manual_slop/conductor/tracks/testing_consolidation_20260302/spec.md

Track Specification: Testing & Simulation Consolidation

Overview

Currently, the codebase has redundant testing paradigms. Some tests (tests/visual_sim_gui_ux.py) properly use the live_gui fixture managed by pytest in conftest.py. However, other visual verification scripts (like tests/visual_mma_verification.py and potentially files in simulation/) reinvent the wheel by manually opening subprocesses with subprocess.Popen to launch the GUI. This fragmentation causes tech debt and test flakiness.

Current State Audit

1. Redundant Subprocess Launching: tests/visual_mma_verification.py manually spawns gui_2.py via subprocess.Popen instead of using the conftest.py live_gui fixture.
2. Simulation Redundancy: The simulation/ directory contains sim_base.py, workflow_sim.py, etc., that also use ApiHookClient but may be reinventing pytest workflows outside of the standard test runner.

Desired State

• All "visual" or "integration" testing scripts that interact with the live GUI via ApiHookClient MUST use the live_gui pytest fixture and be executed via pytest.
• Any standalone scripts in tests/ that manually spawn subprocess.Popen for gui_2.py must be rewritten as standard pytest functions taking the live_gui argument.

Technical Constraints

• No tests should manually spawn gui_2.py. They must rely on conftest.py.
• Keep testing framework unified strictly under pytest.