Pre-Ship Checklist

Use this as a set of prompts for a quick self-audit, not a list of gates that must all pass. Items that don’t apply to a component can be ignored; items the list doesn’t mention but your component clearly needs should be added. Walk back to the pattern or cross-cutting concern that needs attention for any item that prompts a “we should fix that.”

• The bulk of the suite is sociable unit tests that exercise how behaviors collaborate to deliver a domain operation. Solitary unit tests are reserved for genuinely complex pure logic.
• Tests are organized around domain operations, not around classes or methods. Test names read as something a stakeholder would recognize.
• Every public-interface contract (inbound and outbound) has a contract test running in the pipeline.
• Classes are tested through their public methods only. No reflection, no test-only visibility relaxations, no asserting on private state.
• Every consumed external dependency is wrapped in a gateway the team owns; doubles are of the gateway, not of the third-party library.
• Every boundary adapter has an adapter integration test against the real dependency or a high-fidelity stand-in (testcontainer, WireMock with provider fixtures).
• The bulk of testing runs in-band in the pipeline and gates the build; out-of-band checks against real systems run on a schedule and trigger review on failure, never a build break.
• Every test double has a corresponding non-deterministic check that exercises the real dependency on a schedule or post-deploy.
• Every documented failure mode has a negative test.
• Every error response has a test that verifies the error envelope, status code, and any side effects (or absence thereof).
• Time, randomness, and the network are injected, not called directly. No sleep in tests. Use bounded polling or a fake clock.
• All deterministic tests run pre-commit and in CI Stage 1, and fail the build on failure.
• All post-deploy integration checks run out of pipeline and trigger review on failure, never blocking a commit.
• Pipeline gates map to defect sources from the Systemic Defect Fixes catalog. If a defect category has no automated check, that’s a known risk.
• Authn and authz are tested across every protected endpoint, not as one-offs per feature.
• Database migrations are tested forward, backward (where supported), and on representative data volume against the production engine.
• Fixtures are generated from the schema or built through Object Mother / builder helpers, not inline literals.
• Failure-path tests assert on observability (metric incremented, structured log emitted with correlation ID), not just the response.
• Per-endpoint perf budgets exist for hot paths; load tests gate production promotion; soak tests run out of pipeline.
• Flaky tests are quarantined with a dated owner and time-boxed remediation. No permanent quarantine list.
• The deterministic suite respects the pattern’s time budget (under 5 to 8 minutes per component, under 10 minutes total).