TripWire

The Problem: Coverage percentages only tell you what ran, not what matters. Teams chase a single number while the files that change most often, carry the most decision paths, or sit at the intersection of high complexity and low coverage keep slipping through untested. There's no clear answer to "what should I test next, given limited time?" The Solution: Trip Wire computes a transparent, file-level risk score for every file in a codebase: 40% normalized churn (from git log), 30% normalized complexity, and 30% statement coverage gap. It ranks every file by that score and hands the list to IBM Bob 2.0, which tests the highest-risk files first, in measurable batches, narrating its reasoning at every step so it can be checked against real command output rather than a post-hoc summary. Target Users & Interaction: Engineering teams and maintainers who inherit a codebase with an incomplete test suite. A developer runs npm run risk to generate the ranked report, opens the live dashboard to see tested versus pending risk, and directs Bob at the top of the list. The workflow is proven end-to-end on Chalk v5.4.1 (chalk/chalk): a prepared baseline of 66.66% statement coverage rose to 73.49% after Bob's first test batch on the highest-risk file (tools/risk-lib.js), 81.85% after batch two, and a final 82.08% after batch three, all backed by verbatim c8 output and screenshots, with 94 of 94 AVA tests passing. What Makes It Creative & Unique: Trip Wire doesn't just generate tests, it decides where testing effort belongs before a single test is written, and shows its work. Bob is explicitly asked to challenge the risk model rather than trust it, and in practice caught and fixed three real bugs in the scoring logic (statement-weighted coverage, rename-aware churn, deterministic tie-breaking, and crash-safety on empty repos) before writing any tests. Every stage, from baseline to final coverage, is reproducible from commands in the repo and backed by raw transcripts, not just summarized claims. Effectiveness & Efficiency: By combining churn, complexity, and coverage gaps into one visible formula instead of relying on coverage alone, Trip Wire directs limited testing time to the files most likely to break in production. The result is measurable: three prioritized batches, totaling 62 new tests, moved real statement coverage from 66.66% to 82.08% on a live, publicly verifiable codebase, with a dependency-free dashboard deployed at ibm-bob-risk-dashboard.onrender.com for anyone to inspect.