Some engineering mistakes announce themselves immediately. The more expensive ones arrive as a green check beside the wrong result.
That is why I have grown suspicious of tests that prove only that a process completed. A request can return successfully while the user sees a placeholder. A deployment can be healthy while the important control is missing. A parser can accept its input while quietly discarding the one field that mattered.
The remedy is not endless ceremony. It is one extra question, asked deliberately: what would the person on the other side actually observe? Then we test that observation, not a convenient proxy for it.
“Almost right” is not a small distance from right. It is a different destination with better paperwork.
Leave a Reply