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)
6 lines
795 B
Markdown
6 lines
795 B
Markdown
The Oracle Problem. This is the most glaring missing piece. Your entire framework asks how do we know? — but you haven't yet tackled the uniquely testing-flavoured version: how do we know what "correct" means? An oracle is whatever tells a test whether an output is right. In your world, oracles are sometimes requirements, sometimes expectations, sometimes customer satisfaction, sometimes regulator sign-off — and they conflict. Elaine Weyuker's original 1982 paper[1] on the oracle assumption and Doug Hoffman's "Heuristic Test Oracles"[2] are the obvious anchors. This also unifies your Categories-of-Testing triad: each of the three fact-kinds has its own oracle species.
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1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1093/comjnl/25.4.465
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2. https://www.stickyminds.com/article/heuristic-test-oracles
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