Wiki has an interesting definition of what Satsang is which seems to describe in slightly different words what you are doing. Replace "indian philosophy" with "software testing" and "guru" with "expert" and you're there.

Interesting discussion, just wanted to highlight this as it was an eyeopened when I spoke to my wife (a yoga teacher) about Satsang today.

A check results in "pass" or "fail"; that can be a non-sapient decision. It requires a human to decide "Is this a big deal?" "Is the check, rather than the product, broken?" "Should we change the product or drop this check?" "Even though this check reports 'fail', can we still ship?" "Should we be doing any more checks or tests, or do we already know enough?"

One more thing, though. I don't want to enforce orthodoxy on speech; that way lies the ISTQB and the SWEBOK and all that. In casual conversation, it makes little difference what word you use. It's when you want to think critically about what you're up to that the distinction (and not the label) matters. "I want to check to make sure that these are good tests," is a fine thing to say, even if what you're doing is really very testerly, and far more than checkish.

@james: Yes, "linked to" is better. I've changed it above. The links are powerful enough that I'd contend that the observation is motivated by, even dominated by the decision rule. And that jUnit example is paradigmatic.

—Michael B.

Asserts in jUnit are a perfect example of an observation (result of function call) connected to a decision rule (if fail then…)

I wanted to chime in to see if you consider this to be a "check" or not. The last rule throws up a red flag for me, because it seems that sapience is required for some checks, but I'm sure you and James already worked that out.

Scenario: I'm reviewing test cases designed by testers. I observe that they are not specifically going to stress the system. I have a decision rule in place "If testing occurs on a piece of software then check for stress testing opportunities." It doesn't seem to me that a non-sapient entity could even make the observation, because it requires the parsing of english sentences or models or napkins. The tester could choose to communicate this information in so many different ways, so I think a human should do this checking (checking for some basic levels of coverage) using tools like SFDPOT while also doing a qualitative analysis of the test coverage.

Are the things that I sometimes "check" for not really checks in your opinion or do you think that it is possible to make those observations without sapience?

-Joe Harter