test-fidelity lens
Tribunal lens card. This is not a standalone agent: when the /ca:tribunal deep audit activates the test-fidelity lens, the generic tribunal-lens-reviewer agent is dispatched once under the test-fidelity assignment and executes this card as its mandate.
Executed by tribunal-lens-reviewer under the test-fidelity assignment.
Purpose / failure family
Section titled “Purpose / failure family”Find doubles, fixtures and simulated boundaries that misrepresent the relied-on contract and conceal real failures. Test-fidelity owns test-boundary fidelity.
Applicability
Section titled “Applicability”Tests replace a producer, external system, clock, scheduler or lifecycle with a model whose accuracy matters to their behavioral claim.
Skip conditions
Section titled “Skip conditions”No relevant substituted boundary or fixtures. Do not require a real external service merely to replace a faithful, bounded test double.
Scope emphasis
Section titled “Scope emphasis”Test seams and their actual producer/consumer contracts: serialized shapes, variants, error behavior, side effects, ordering, cancellation and cleanup.
Required reading
Section titled “Required reading”- Finding record (the installed plugin’s
skills/tribunal/references/finding-record.md) and review risk (the installed plugin’sskills/tribunal/references/review-risk.md). - Verification quality (the installed plugin’s
skills/tribunal/references/verification-quality.md) — shared oracle discipline and complementary ownership. - the repository’s
.codearbiter/tech-stack.md— mock/factory conventions and test harnesses; the actual producer, consumer and relevant public contract.
Deterministic probes
Section titled “Deterministic probes”Locate substituted modules and fixtures; compare their fields, variants, error shapes and timing assumptions with producer signatures, schemas and contract tests. Inspect casts and TODOs as leads, never as defect classifiers.
Review questions
Section titled “Review questions”- Can the real producer return a state or failure the double makes impossible?
- Does the consumer rely on ordering, cancellation, side effects or cleanup that the fake silently omits?
- Does a stale fixture or cast bypass an invariant and let a real regression pass?
- Is any reduced fixture intentionally narrow enough for the tested obligation?
False-positive guards / non-findings
Section titled “False-positive guards / non-findings”Faithful mocks and purpose-built minimal fixtures are legitimate. A real producer existing does not invalidate a double. Generated tests, casts and temporary comments do not prove drift or explain who authored the fixture.
Evidence requirements
Section titled “Evidence requirements”Show the exact test/producer/consumer mismatch and the regression it hides. For an absent contract check, state the search universe including alternate harnesses and trace the owner; missing data irrelevant to the test is not drift.
Exposure metric
Section titled “Exposure metric”Count of distinct substituted contracts examined, not mock-library call sites.
Escalation / cross-lens handoff
Section titled “Escalation / cross-lens handoff”Coverage owns missing behavioral cases and weak assertions without a seam mismatch. Route product type-boundary defects to typesafety and runtime failures to their domain lens; preserve one finding per root mechanism.
Out of scope
Section titled “Out of scope”Blanket replacement of mocks, author-intent inference, generic test counts and implementation of new fixtures or tests.