Bug Fixing & Test Stabilization Progress Report

Date: December 24, 2025 Status: High Confidence / Stable

Executive Summary

We have successfully diagnosed and resolved a series of persistent environmental and logic bugs that were preventing the test suite from passing. The codebase is now in a much healthier state with reliable automated verification for key feature areas (Media Endpoints, Story Workflow, and Chat Interface).

Current Status

  • Test Suite Health: Significantly Improved.
  • Identified Bugs: 100% Resolved (from the bugs.md list).
  • Recent Wins:
    • Fixed 500 Internal Server Errors in Media API tests.
    • Resolved Temporal SDK integration issues in Workflow tests.
    • Fixed Frontend component crash in JSDOM environment.

Methodology & Approach

Our approach shifted from “fast-paced iteration” to “methodical isolation” when we encountered persistent failures.

  1. Isolation: When a test failed repeatedly (e.g., test_media_endpoints.py), we stopped trying to fix it “en passant” and instead:
    • Created a dedicated tracking artifact (bugs.md).
    • Isolated the failure (e.g., disabling middleware, adding verbose debug logging).
    • Identified the root cause (unexpected exception masking, path mismatches).
  2. Environment Alignment: A key theme was aligning the Test Environment with the Runtime Environment.
    • Backend: Ensured pytest fixtures (conftest.py) matched the expectations of the code under test (e.g., ONEDRIVE_DOCS_PATH).
    • Frontend: Mocked browser APIs (scrollIntoView) and complex ESM dependencies (react-markdown) that are absent or behave differently in the Node.js-based vitest environment.
  3. One-by-One Resolution: We explicitly avoided “whack-a-mole” debugging. We froze the codebase state, documented the bugs, and tackled them sequentially until bugs.md was clear.

Detailed Fixes

1. Backend: Media Endpoints (500 Error)

  • Diagnosis: The images.py router was catching HTTPException(404) inside a generic except Exception block and re-raising it as a 500, masking the true “File Not Found” state. Additionally, the test setup used a path different from the one injected by conftest.py.
  • Fix:
    • Modified images.py to catch and re-raise HTTPException explicitly.
    • Updated test to use os.environ["ONEDRIVE_DOCS_PATH"] for consistent path resolution.

2. Backend: Story Workflow (Temporal TypeError)

  • Diagnosis: The Temporal Python SDK requires activities to be passed as a list when using the @activity.defn decorator style, but we were passing a dictionary. This caused the worker to fail registration.
  • Fix: Refactored the test worker initialization to pass activities=[list_of_functions].

3. Frontend: ChatPanel (Render Crash)

  • Diagnosis: JSDOM (the browser mock used by Vitest) does not implement scrollIntoView, causing the component to crash on mount. Additionally, react-markdown (an ESM-only package) caused import issues in the test runner.
  • Fix:
    • Mocked window.HTMLElement.prototype.scrollIntoView.
    • Mocked react-markdown and remark-gfm to bypass rendering complexity during unit tests.

Outcome Assessment

We are very confident in this approach. By ensuring the verification layer (tests) is reliable, we can now proceed with feature development (Mobile Camera Integration, Sage Visuals) knowing that regressions will be accurately caught. The “Loop of Death” in debugging has been broken by externalizing the state into bugs.md and methodically clearing it.