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What is SLOBAC?

The Suite Life of Bobs and Code is a point of view about what tests should be, what test suites should be, and the named ways both go wrong.

SLOBAC ships several things:

  1. A Manifesto: a self-contained read. No software is required to use it. A reader who finishes these pages should be able to audit their own test suite by hand and classify real tests against the named failure modes.
    1. Principles — what a test should be, and the bounds a disciplined test-suite refactor must respect.
    2. Taxonomy — a catalog of ways tests and test suites can go wrong.
  2. An Agent Skill: Instructions for AI agents to audit a codebases's test suite against the manifesto.

What This Is Not

  • Not a linter. Where existing ecosystem tools already lint syntactically, SLOBAC defers.
  • Not a mutation engine, codemod runner, or test generator — those are mature; SLOBAC orchestrates them, never reimplements.
  • Not a smell-count scoreboard. Optimizing for raw smell counts is an explicit anti-goal (Panichella et al., Test Smells 20 Years Later, EMSE 2023).

How To Start

  1. Read the manifesto:
    • Principles — what a test should be, and the bounds a disciplined test-suite refactor must respect. This is the vocabulary every other page cites.
    • Workflows — the RED-GREEN-MUTATE-KILL-REFACTOR cycle that the taxonomy's prescribed fixes assume. You are doing mutation testing, right? No? Ah, well, you can still use SLOBAC, no worries.
    • Taxonomy — the catalog of named failure modes, one entry per smell. Start with taxonomy/README.md for the curated reading order across the 15 entries; each entry is a standalone page you can jump to directly.
    • Glossary — definitions and citations for terms the other pages rely on (mutation testing, kill-sets, tautology theatre, canonical location, etc.).
  2. Install the audit skill:
  3. Have your AI agents audit your test suite: /slobac-audit and it'll walk you through the process.