Tests, builds and fast feedback

Routine development uses focused local checks and never triggers or waits for CI. Full validation is required for release candidates and remains available locally for a deliberate run.

Inventory

The pre-change snapshot at 6890700c6a32 (2026-09-26) has 172 test files and 2,506 test definitions. Local collection produced 3,989 parameterized cases: 3,980 selected and nine benchmark cases deselected. Optional dependencies affect collection/skips. The new CI-scope tests are additional to this baseline.

The routine smoke inventory now executes 79 cases in six files, down from 293 in the previous sample. A local run with rendering/optional imports blocked and external pytest plugins disabled passed in 6.51 seconds. Nine cell cases were also removed from the sample because one imports the VTK rendering stack. The previous MR test job took 172.59 seconds including setup. These are observed runs, not a controlled equivalent-host speedup test.

Kind	What is actually exercised
Unit/contract	Units, kinds, cells, bonds, configuration, archive metadata/schema, code and release metadata guards
Reader/API integration	Real temporary QVF/ZIP files, payloads/checksums, ownership/closing, corruption handling, conversion and CLI behavior
Rendering/application integration	VTK/PyVista objects and offscreen renders, controller state, browser/TUI behavior, geometry and volume transformations
External/optional integration	QC wavefunction/relocalization and live optimization; optional format/tool integrations; served-browser tests need a browser
Benchmarks	Nine cases excluded by the normal marker default; opt in with pytest -m benchmark
Build checks	Wheel/sdist reproducibility, clean installed-wheel smoke and dependency integrity; Sphinx site build
Static checks	Ruff, and full strict mypy in full-validation pipelines

This is a pure-Python package. CI installs prebuilt rendering dependencies; it normally does not compile a quantum-chemistry core or run a chemistry campaign. QC-dependent tests can skip here. A pinned subset runs with a real QC core in the producer’s release gate. Full viewer CI is not proof that every optional browser or QC-dependent route ran.

Pipeline matrix

Context	Ruff	Primary Python 3.13	Mypy + Python 3.11 + 3.14	Wheel/sdist + installed-wheel smoke
Development refs and MRs, including web/scheduled/API requests	No pipeline	No pipeline	No pipeline	No pipeline
Release candidate, any trigger	Yes	QVF conformance + full normal suite	Yes	Yes
Release branch	No repeated runtime gate	Docs publication build only	No	No

The fast sample covers QVF open/write/schema, units, kinds and privacy. It omits the broad reader-ownership, API, bond/render/controller and CI-policy suites from routine runs. There is no automatic changed-test expansion or Git history lookup. Run affected tests locally or use --scope changed deliberately; in an MR environment that adds changed test files (and selects document contracts for prose-only diffs). Full validation still includes these tests.

Local smoke setup needs the core package and pytest. Candidate CI always installs the test/release extras, external QVF corpus and GL/Xvfb stack, and runs conformance, the full suites and packaging unconditionally. A test-scope variable cannot downgrade it to smoke. Docs build strictly on candidates and publish from release; development docs changes use a local check. Candidate pipelines disable automatic cancellation.

Run or inspect a lane

The QVF check uses the existing QVF_TAG clone from GitLab and compares vendored bytes against that release. CI installs the reference validator from that same clone’s python[validate] package before the test extras. For local checks, install it from your checkout of the pinned release first:

python -m pip install '/path/to/qvf/python[validate]'
python -m pip install -e '.[test,validation]'
python scripts/check_qvf_conformance.py --qvf-root /path/to/qvf --strict-negatives

The candidate lane always uses --strict-negatives. Positive and legacy archives must validate, open, decode vibration/GTO payloads and parse viewer hints. Every negative must produce the expected error or warning codes from its .expected.json; resource-cap fixtures use that file’s limits overrides. Warning-only fixtures must remain valid. Exceptions, wrong acceptance, missing codes and schema drift fail the strict check. No corpus entries are skipped.

The pinned v0.4.0 corpus passes: 76/76 positive and legacy archives and 110/110 negative expectations, with zero gaps or unexpected exceptions. Without --strict-negatives, the script still reports missing findings as gaps for diagnosis. Format and resource rules come from qvf’s reference validator, not a second implementation in vibe-view. Neither lane edits the corpus or the vendored schema.

PYVISTA_OFF_SCREEN=True python scripts/run_ci_tests.py --scope fast
python scripts/run_ci_tests.py --scope fast --list-targets
PYVISTA_OFF_SCREEN=True python scripts/run_ci_tests.py --scope changed  # opt-in MR diff expansion
python scripts/run_ci_tests.py --scope full
python -m pytest tests/test_<area>.py -q
python -m pytest tests --collect-only -q

FAST_TESTS and PROSE_TESTS in scripts/run_ci_tests.py are the explicit sample. The full suite is retained: no bulk deletion of regression tests. GitLab web, scheduled and API requests create pipelines only on release refs; target a release-candidate/* branch to repeat full qualification. JUnit and the 30 slowest phases are published for the runtime jobs. Package artifacts are produced only by the full primary job.