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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)
619 B
619 B
The Tester as Witness. You've done inspector, scientist, user, explorer, investigative journalist. The legal metaphor is conspicuously absent. A witness does not argue the case, does not render the verdict, and is not the prosecution — but their testimony is what the court's judgment rests on. This cleanly dissolves the "tester as gatekeeper" confusion you raised in Five Essential Lessons. Hume on testimony[1] and C.A.J. Coady's Testimony: A Philosophical Study[2] are obvious references.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#AnEnHuUn [2] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/testimony-9780198235514