Testing vs. Checking

The context-driven school’s sharpest distinction (Bach & Bolton): checking is the mechanistic verification of propositions about the product, automatable by definition. Testing is the exploratory, questioning activity that decides which propositions are worth checking, and that part doesn’t automate. “There is no such thing as automated testing; what gets automated is checking” (Bach).

The property-list tradition and the context-driven school have argued past each other for a decade: parallel trenches, no direct engagement. This garden concedes the vocabulary instead of fighting it: the suite contains Automated Checks, and prediction is bounded by what those checks were told to look for.