Characterization Testing

I think that the most confusing thing about testing is the word testing. We use it for many things, from exploratory testing and manual testing to unit testing and other forms of automation. The core issue is that we need to know that our code works, and we’ve lumped together a variety of practices and put them under this banner. We can look for some common strands between them but they are hard to find.

Most types of testing have the quality of being about correctness. We test our code to se...