Test quality review drawing on twelve classic engineering books — with primary focus on xUnit Test Patterns, The Art of Unit Testing, How Google Tests Software, and Working Effectively with Legacy Code — that diagnoses structural problems in an existing test suite: brittleness, mock abuse, coverage illusions, slow execution, poor readability. Triggers when: user asks about test quality, shares test files for review, or expresses frustration: "tests keep breaking whenever I change anything", "our tests take forever", "tests pass but bugs still reach production", or "we have too many mocks". Do
Use brooks-test to review the existing test files I provide. Build a test suite map and assess structural problems such as brittleness, mock abuse, coverage illusions, and poor readability. Return the documented review report without changing files.
Required inputs
A small set of existing test files or a focused test directory
The production code those tests exercise
The skill's referenced shared framework and test-guide.md must be available
Previously published starter task based on a pinned source version; check the source and required inputs before running. Task evidence ↗
SKILL.md
name: brooks-testdescription: > Test quality review drawing on twelve classic engineering books — with primary focus on xUnit Test Patterns, The Art of Unit Testing, How Google Tests Software, and Working Effectively with Legacy Code — that diagnoses structural problems in an existing test suite: brittleness, mock abuse, coverage illusions, slow execution, poor readability. Triggers when: user asks about test quality, shares test files for review, or expresses frustration: "tests keep breaking whenever I change anything", "our tests take forever", "tests pass but bugs still reach production", or "we have too many mocks". Do NOT trigger for: writing new tests from scratch (use the regular test-writing workflow) or testing framework/syntax questions — this skill reviews an existing suite for structural quality problems, not individual test authoring.metadata: opencode/slash: "true"
Brooks-Lint — Test Quality Review
Setup
Read in order:
../_shared/common.md — Iron Law, Project Config, Report Template, Health Score
../_shared/source-coverage.md — book coverage, exceptions, tradeoffs
../_shared/test-decay-risks.md — test-space symptom definitions and sources
test-guide.md (this directory) — the test quality review framework
Process
Scope: if the user did not share test files or point to a test directory, apply Auto
Scope Detection (../_shared/common.md) first.
Build the test suite map (guide's "Before You Start" section)
Scan for each test decay risk in the order specified (Steps 1–4 of the guide)
Apply the Iron Law and output using the Report Template (Step 5 of the guide)