PR Manual Testing

Some skern changes — CLI behavior, skill management, platform adapters, registry logic — require manual verification that CI cannot provide. This page documents the lightweight manual test verification step required on PRs before merge.

When Is It Required?

Manual test verification is required for PRs that touch:

• CLI commands or flags (internal/cli/)
• Skill management logic (internal/skill/, internal/registry/)
• Platform adapters (internal/platform/)
• Overlap detection (internal/overlap/)
• Output formatting (internal/output/)

Exemptions

The following PRs are exempt from manual test verification:

• Documentation-only changes (docs/, *.md outside internal/)
• CI/CD configuration changes (.github/workflows/)
• Trivially mechanical changes (typo fixes, import reordering, comment edits)

Mark exempt PRs with a comment noting the exemption reason, then check the template checkbox.

Comment Format

A maintainer posts a PR comment with the following table before merge:

### Manual Test Verification

| # | Scenario | Result | Notes |
|---|----------|--------|-------|
| 1 | `skern skill list` shows expected skills | :white_check_mark: | |
| 2 | `skern skill install <name> --platform claude-code` works | :white_check_mark: | |
| 3 | `skern platform status` reflects installed skill | :white_check_mark: | |
| 4 | *<add rows relevant to the PR>* | | |

**Tested at:** `<commit SHA>`
**Platform:** `<OS / shell>`

Adapt the rows to the specific PR — only test what the PR changes. Keep it brief.

Rules

1. Pass / Fail / Skip — use ✅ (pass), ❌ (fail), or ⏩ (skip with reason in Notes).
2. All rows must pass before merge. If any row fails, the PR must be updated and re-tested.
3. Pin the commit SHA — record which commit was tested. If new commits are pushed after the verification comment, the test must be re-run.
4. Brevity — test only what the PR changes. Don't re-run the full agent test harness (that's a separate concern, see below).

Labels

Two GitHub labels track manual test status:

Label	Color	Meaning
needs-manual-test	yellow	PR requires manual test verification before merge
manual-test-verified	green	Manual test verification has been posted and passes

Maintainers apply needs-manual-test when opening or reviewing a non-exempt PR, and replace it with manual-test-verified after a passing verification comment.

Relationship to the Agent Test Harness

The agent test harness (tests/manual/) is a separate, more comprehensive concern — it covers 10 end-to-end scenarios for pre-release validation. PR manual testing is lighter: it verifies only the specific behavior changed by the PR. The two complement each other but are independent processes.