E2E contract boundaries

This page records the current end-to-end and contract-test boundary coverage used for release-safety review. The audit is intentionally conservative: a boundary is marked covered only when a pytest module name maps to that boundary, and static notebook/example checks are not treated as executed scientific validation.

Boundary categories

Boundary	Current contract
Hardware/QPU	Hardware runner, backend, QPU data, and simulator guard tests cover the execution boundary without requiring live QPU access.
Bridge	Bridge property and coverage tests cover Hamiltonian, adapter, and spectral bridge surfaces.
SC-NeuroCore	SNN adapter, training, validation, and E2E bridge tests cover the local integration boundary.
Phase Orchestrator	Adapter, helper, error, and feedback tests cover orchestrator payload conversion and telemetry contracts.
Notebook workflows	Static contract verifies committed notebooks are valid nbformat-4 JSON artefacts with cells, metadata, recognised cell types, and notebook-compatible source fields.
Example workflows	Static contract verifies every example script parses, exposes main(), uses a main guard, and is listed in examples/README.md.

Audit command

./.venv-linux/bin/python tools/audit_e2e_contract_boundaries.py --tests-root tests --fail-on-missing

The command must report covered: 6 and missing: 0 before this roadmap item is considered closed.

Claim boundary

The notebook and example contracts are repository-hygiene checks. They do not execute long-running notebooks, optional-dataset workflows, IBM jobs, or optimisation-heavy demonstrations. Any scientific result used in a paper must still be regenerated from its dedicated committed script and artefact package.