<?xml version="1.0" ?><entry xml:lang="en-us" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:planet="http://planet.intertwingly.net/"><id>https://blog.nelhage.com/post/two-kinds-of-testing/</id><link href="https://blog.nelhage.com/post/two-kinds-of-testing/" rel="alternate" type="text/html"/><title>Two kinds of testing</title><summary>While talking about thinking about tests and testing in software engineering recently, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are (at least) two major ideas and goals that people have when they test or talk about testing. This post aims to outline what I see as these two schools, and explore some reasons engineers coming from these different perspectives can risk talking past each other.
Two reasons to test Testing for correctness The first school of testing comprises those who see testing as a tool for validating a software artifact against some externally-defined standard of correctness.</summary><updated planet:format="December 24, 2019 09:09 PM">2019-12-24T21:09:55Z</updated><source><id>https://blog.nelhage.com/post/</id><author><name>Nelson Elhage</name></author><link href="https://blog.nelhage.com/post/" rel="alternate" type="text/html"/><link href="https://blog.nelhage.com/post/atom.xml" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><subtitle>Recent content in Posts on Made of Bugs</subtitle><title>Posts on Made of Bugs</title><updated planet:format="September 16, 2026 11:37 AM">2026-09-16T11:37:04Z</updated><planet:format>rss20</planet:format><planet:bozo>false</planet:bozo><planet:items_per_page>60</planet:items_per_page><planet:name>Nelson Elhage</planet:name><planet:css-id>nelson-elhage</planet:css-id><planet:days_per_page>0</planet:days_per_page><planet:http_etag>&quot;5b2ae9eec2e293572f6ae5a000bd0161-ssl-df&quot;</planet:http_etag><planet:http_status>200</planet:http_status><planet:encoding>utf-8</planet:encoding></source></entry>