[MACRO] - CX_HARDENING - Consensus Usability, Testing and Hardening

[jparr721]

What is this task and why do we need to work on it?

This macro task encompasses the effort to improve the overall hardening of the consensus protocol and HotShot as a whole. We currently are in the situation in which our tests either do not exhaustively cover their range of inputs, don't cover the possible permutations of inputs, and do not sufficiently check for more realistic cases that we've seen in testnets. We also do not have sufficient documentation on critical methods, and have an imminent need to remove legacy code, dead code, and issue tags from the codebase to ensure that HotShot maintains its high code quality.

What work will need to be done to complete this task?

Many of the testing improvements can be done in parallel, some PRs might need to be broken down to keep them small since the test framework can be bloated.

Testing Improvements

• [x] - #3161 - This one should be done first.
• [x] - #3268
• [ ] - #3160
• [x] - #3165
• [x] - #3166
• [ ] - #3167
• [ ] - #3168
• [x] - #3169
• [ ] - #3247
• [ ] - #3248
• [ ] - #3249
• [ ] - #3250
• [x] - #3251
• [x] - #3452
• [ ] - #1136

Consensus Usability Improvements

• [x] - #3637
• [x] - #3638
• [x] - #3639
• [ ] - #3640
• [ ] - #3215

Consensus Documentation Improvements

Are there any other details to include?

No response

What are the acceptance criteria to close this issue?

All tests are passing

Branch work will be merged to (if not the default branch)

No response