Testing strategy

July 19, 2026 · View on GitHub

This document explains AspectCore's test categories, the purpose of each category, and the coverage thresholds and required checks in CI. All test projects are located in tests/ and are based on xUnit (xunit 2.9.2).

1. Test categories

Unit tests (AspectCore.Core.Tests)

Cover the unit behavior of the core runtime: dynamic proxy generation, the interceptor pipeline, dependency injection and the injector, configuration, and so on. The directories are divided by topic (DynamicProxy/, DependencyInjection/, Injector/, Configuration/, Integrate/, Issues/, Extensions/, Utils/, etc.). The target frameworks are net10.0;net9.0;net8.0;net6.0.

Dual-engine parity tests (AspectCore.Core.Tests/EngineParity/)

AspectCore provides two equivalent proxy-generation engines: the runtime DynamicProxy and the compile-time Source Generator. The two share the same interception semantics, so they must behave identically — for the same types and methods, the interception result should be the same no matter which engine generated the proxy. EngineParity/ exists precisely to guard this invariant, covering language features that tend to diverge between the two implementations, for example:

  • RefReturnParityTests — ref / ref readonly return values
  • InitRequiredMembersParityTests — init and required members
  • RefStructAndScopedParityTests — ref struct and scoped
  • PrimaryConstructorAndParamsCollectionParityTests — primary constructors and params collections
  • InterpolatedStringHandlerAndIndexRangeParityTests — interpolated string handlers and Index/Range
  • record type parity
  • SourceGeneratorDynamicProxyParityTests, SourceGeneratorEdgeCaseTests, SourceGeneratorDiagnosticTests, etc.

For the differences between the two engines and how to choose, see Comparing and choosing between the two engines.

End-to-end tests (AspectCore.E2E.Tests/Scenarios)

Complete scenario tests organized from the user's perspective, with cases concentrated in Scenarios/ (such as basic proxying, async Task/ValueTask, DI integration, configuration-driven, error handling, generic services, property injection, record types, ref returns, etc.), and shared hosts and services in Fixtures/ (TestHost.cs, TestServices.cs). The target frameworks are net10.0;net9.0;net8.0;net6.0.

Reflection tests (AspectCore.Extensions.Reflection.Test)

Cover the AspectCore.Extensions.Reflection high-performance reflection extensions. The target frameworks are net9.0;net8.0;net6.0.

Per-container / host integration tests

Verify AspectCore's integration with third-party containers and hosts:

  • AspectCore.Extensions.Autofac.Test, AspectCore.Extensions.Windsor.Test, AspectCore.Extensions.LightInject.Test, AspectCore.Extensions.Hosting.Tests, AspectCore.Extensions.Configuration.Tests — net9.0;net8.0;net6.0
  • AspectCore.Extensions.DependencyInjection.Test — net9.0;net6.0

2. Coverage tooling

All test projects uniformly bring in coverlet.msbuild (6.0.2) via tests/Directory.Build.props to collect coverage. CI uses .github/scripts/check-coverage.sh to collect line coverage in cobertura format on net9.0 and assert the thresholds.

Collection scope (see the check-coverage.sh script):

  • Unit coverage: iterate over the *.csproj under ./tests, excluding projects whose name contains E2E; each test project is filtered by its corresponding source assembly (e.g. AspectCore.Extensions.Windsor.Test → [AspectCore.Extensions.Windsor]*), then the arithmetic mean of each project's coverage is taken.
  • E2E coverage: only *E2E*.csproj, and deliberately counts only [AspectCore.Core] and [AspectCore.Abstractions] (extension assemblies are measured separately by their own unit-test projects).

3. Coverage thresholds and required CI checks

PRs are validated by .github/workflows/build-pr-ci.yml, and the coverage thresholds are defined in check-coverage.sh:

  • Unit-test coverage threshold: 95% (UT_THRESHOLD=95)
  • E2E-test coverage threshold: 80% (E2E_THRESHOLD=80)

Branch protection requires all of the following status checks to pass:

  • lint
  • build-and-test (ubuntu-latest)
  • build-and-test (windows-latest)
  • Unit Test Execution
  • Unit Test Coverage Result
  • E2E Test Execution
  • E2E Test Coverage Result

Coverage is split into two independent jobs, "execution" and "threshold assertion": *-test-execution runs the tests and collects the results, and *-test-coverage-result asserts whether the target is met. In addition, PRs also run CodeQL (C#) analysis. For the merge policy and review requirements, see Contributing guide.