The testing standard

The Testing & Quality Standard is policy: it says what is required, and it opens with three non-negotiable principles. A behavior change is incomplete without a test and a doc change; a flaky test is a bug, never "just retry"; and determinism is a property of the suite - same input, same result, on any machine, in any order.

Test shape follows the layer

Cogitave does not mandate one shape across the stack; the shape follows the failure modes of the layer.

• Backend / hot path (Rust, Go) - a pyramid. Roughly unit ~70%, integration ~20%, end-to-end ~10%, as an order-of-magnitude guide, not a quota.
• Frontend / edge (TypeScript) - a trophy. The integration tier (component + interaction, real DOM, mocked network) catches the most regressions per unit of maintenance, so emphasis runs integration > unit ~= e2e > static.

Required types, by surface

Not every type applies to every repo. Unit tests are always mandatory. Integration is mandatory once a repo crosses a real boundary (DB, network, FFI, transport), because adapters lie and types do not catch wire drift. Property-based tests are required on core logic (parsers, encoders, query planners, auth checks); fuzz tests on untrusted-input attack surfaces such as yuva, namzu, and protocol decoders; contract tests on any boundary with an independent consumer; and evals on any agent-behavior change.

Coverage is a floor and a trend, never a goal

High line coverage with weak assertions is theater. The thresholds are per-file 70%, per-package 80%, and repo 90% target / 85% hard floor - but the blocking gate is patch (diff) coverage: 90% of changed lines. That is what makes the gate fair on legacy code and strict on new code, plus a no-regression ratchet on the repo total. Watch the documented pitfalls: coverage is not correctness, coverage farming (tests that touch lines without asserting) is review-rejectable, and exclusions must be checked-in, commented ignore rules - never a silent CI flag.

Mutation testing is the real adequacy gate

For modules flagged tier: critical (hot paths, auth, Core logic), line coverage is necessary but not sufficient. Mutation testing perturbs the code - flips a <, drops a + 1 - and asserts the suite fails; a surviving mutant is an untested assertion. The threshold is >= 80% of mutants killed on the critical set before merge.

A flaky test is quarantined, not tolerated

When CI detects a test that passes and fails on the same commit, it is quarantined immediately - it still runs and reports but does not block merge - and a defect is filed with an owner and a default 7-day deadline. Past the deadline, the quarantine blocks the owning team's merges. Blanket retries may detect flakiness; they may never be the remedy.