🎯 Max Testables

Early agents generate tests for eligible methods based on visibility, coverage, and change detection.
The max-testables setting allows you to cap the number of methods that will be processed in a single run.

This provides a practical way to control execution time and resource usage in CI workflows.

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🧠 What This Controls

After all other filtering logic is applied (visibility, coverage, and change detection), Early applies a final limit on how many methods will be selected for test generation.

This limit:

• Does not change which methods are eligible
• Only limits how many eligible methods are processed
• Helps keep CI runs predictable and bounded

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🔄 Default Values

The default limit depends on the agent type:

Agent Type	Default MAX_TESTABLES
PR Agent	5
Commit Agent	5
Repository Agent	30

These defaults are tuned to balance coverage improvement with reasonable CI execution time.

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⚙️ Configuration Options

You can configure this limit using either a CLI flag or an environment variable.

CLI Flag

--max-testables <number>

Environment Variable

export MAX_TESTABLES=<number>

Both options are equivalent.

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🧪 Behavior Details

• The limit is applied after all filtering logic completes
• If fewer eligible methods are found than the limit, all are processed
• If more are found, only the first N methods are selected
• Selection order is deterministic within a run

This ensures stable and predictable behavior across executions.

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🔧 When to Tune This Value

You may want to lower the limit when:

• CI time is critical
• PRs tend to touch many methods
• You want fast, incremental feedback

You may want to increase the limit when:

• Running repository-wide or scheduled jobs
• Performing coverage backfills
• You want more aggressive test generation in a single run

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🧪 Example: GitHub Actions

env:
  MAX_TESTABLES: "3"

This limits test generation to at most 3 methods for the run.

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🧪 Example: Jenkins

environment {
  MAX_TESTABLES = '10'
}

Or inline before running the CLI:

export MAX_TESTABLES=10
early generate-pr

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📌 Notes

• This setting applies to all agent types, including PR, commit, and repository agents
• It works in combination with changed-methods-only for PR and commit agents
• Increasing this value may increase CI runtime proportionally

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✅ Summary

Setting	Default (PR / Commit)	Default (Repo)	Purpose
--max-testables	5	30	Limit number of methods tested
MAX_TESTABLES	5	30	Environment-based equivalent

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Use this setting to balance coverage gains against CI execution time, especially in larger repositories or high-churn pull requests.