{"id":1648,"date":"2014-04-07T01:08:20","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T06:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/?p=1648"},"modified":"2014-03-10T08:22:16","modified_gmt":"2014-03-10T13:22:16","slug":"the-purpose-of-testing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/2014\/04\/the-purpose-of-testing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Purpose of Testing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n<p><strong>A good test provides information\u2014no more and no less.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take a step back to the fundamentals of engineering and building things. Part of building some thing is to perform some tests on the thing.<\/p>\n<p>Why perform a test? The oft-cited answer is, &#8220;to show that the thing works.&#8221; Deep sigh.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We test a thing to get information.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sometimes, a successful test tells us that the thing doesn&#8217;t do what we wanted it. That is information. Sometimes, a successful test tells us that the thing does some of what we want but not all of what we want. That is information.<\/p>\n<p>Somehow, this little bit of knowledge about testing has escaped us. Sometimes, we need little reminders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Dwayne Phillips A good test provides information\u2014no more and no less. Let&#8217;s take a step back to the fundamentals of engineering and building things. Part of building some thing is to perform some tests on the thing. Why perform a test? The oft-cited answer is, &#8220;to show that the thing works.&#8221; Deep sigh. We [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,58,50],"tags":[170,178,172],"class_list":["post-1648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-systems-thinking","category-systems","category-thinking","tag-general-systems-thinking","tag-systems","tag-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1648"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1652,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1648\/revisions\/1652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}