544b773e8f
Introduces nine new draft articles exploring intersections of software testing with philosophy, epistemology, and related concepts: - On Flakiness (Heraclitus and non-deterministic tests) - Popper and the Risky Test (demarcation criterion) - Regression as Institutional Memory (Wittgenstein's On Certainty) - Tacit Knowledge and the Testing Checklist (Polanyi's tacit dimension) - Test Environments as Platonic Shadows (Plato's cave allegory) - The Tester as Witness (legal metaphor and testimony) - Testing Probabilistic Systems (ML and statistical testing) - The Oracle Problem (oracles in testing frameworks) - When Quality Becomes Quantity (Goodhart's Law and metrics)
757 B
757 B
On Flakiness — or, Heraclitus and the Non-Deterministic Test. You have direct pain here from the Appium Mac2 multi-monitor work. A flaky test is the software-testing expression of Heraclitus' river[1] — you can never step into the same test run twice. But a flaky test isn't nothing; it's a signal that one of your background assumptions about determinism is wrong. The usual move is to quarantine or delete; the philosophical move is to ask what the flakiness is telling you about your model of the system. Martin Fowler's "Eradicating Non-Determinism in Tests"[2] is the standard reference but deserves to be argued with rather than cited.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/ [2] https://martinfowler.com/articles/nonDeterminism.html