Not sure I understand your question/issue.  I don't fully remember the details of what I saw when trying to fix the original test which as far as I can tell didn't work as I would expect.  I think if you provided more details of what you're asking it would help me understand.  That is examples of what you're expecting based on what the test does (uses virsh desc to change the --title and virsh list to validate).

The issue I believe I was attempting to resolve is that when adjusting a running guest and expecting that output to be seen "live" one has to supply the proper parameters to make the adjustment.  By supplying "--config" to a running guest, only the guest config is adjusted and not the running guest.  The way the test was added to the matrix - the changes will be attempted for both active and inactive domains.  Those results will be different - this is similar to other tests.

There's perhaps more than one way to solve this - the options_ref may allow to view the configuration data of the dom_list (eg, virsh list) call, but I chose to adjust where it was being set based on the test that was being done, not where the validation checks if the test properly did something.  That is rather than modify the virsh list of an active guest to check if the configuration of the guest was changed for the --title test, I modified the setting of the --title for a live guest to not be for the live guest.  Another "solution" might be to remove the "--config" and just let "--current" take over (there's a couple of different outcomes based on switches).