14 pages tagged.
Rebuilding Beck's Test Desiderata from the field's evidence. What survives cross-author scrutiny, what gets renamed, and what quietly took sides.
The suite runs and judges itself without a human. Beck's "Automated", renamed to concede what automation actually automates.
Tests specify the contract a caller can observe, not the implementation behind it.
Same code, same result, every run. One flaky test and the suite's verdict stops meaning anything.
When a test fails, the cause should be obvious from the failure alone. One defect, one failure.
Speed is not a nicety; it is the precondition for the tests being run at all.
If you can change a value without changing the result, it's irrelevant data, and irrelevant data hurts.
The macro goal every property serves. Green means safe to ship, within the limits of what was specified.
A test is documentation that happens to execute. Tell the reader what you're testing, not that you're testing.
The failure of one test can never make another test look broken. Bache's sharper name for Beck's Isolated.
A behavior-preserving refactor should never change a test's result. The one property still awaiting its cross-author audit.
Ten properties, one macro goal, one outcome. A field-grounded remake of Beck's and Bache's lists that keeps what the evidence supports.
Checking verifies propositions and automates; testing asks which propositions matter, and doesn't.
Tests should be cheap to author, but authoring cost is design feedback, not a lever to pull directly.