Six tests that passed for the wrong reason
My backup script told me the restore was verified. It restored ten tables with zero rows in every one, checked the schema, and printed VERIFIED. The schema check passed because an empty database has every table. The row counts were printed but never compared to anything. A dump that lost every row would have looked exactly like a dump that worked — and I’d have found out during the incident it…
Six tests passed despite not meeting their intended criteria. The backup script indicated successful restoration of ten tables with no rows. The schema check didn't compare row counts, so an empty database appeared verified. A stability gate was flawed, a "recent-quiet" rule was mislabeled, and a health-check scenario maintained a low volume that never existed.
A false-positive corpus falsely reported zero false positives, including one known case. A "cloud scale-out" scenario didn't exercise its intended condition. A bucketing test had identical constant assertion and input. Lastly, a test passed after the tested feature was removed, demonstrating intuition's inability to detect these issues.
The common thread is that a check measuring an adjacent factor looked identical to one measuring the actual claim, appearing green despite failing the necessary condition.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
