scott-garvin build-test-truth
Green is a claim, not a fact. A build or test command can report success while running nothing that matters.
The green-by-skip traps
- Zero tests discovered. The runner started, found no tests (a bad filter, a misconfigured adapter, a path typo), and exited 0. Zero failures is not a pass.
- Self-skipping suites. Environment-gated tests that silently skip when a flag or dependency is absent report green having asserted nothing. The suite you cared about never ran.
- False-green runners. Some tool and flag combinations report success while executing nothing. Know the ones in your stack; treat an unexpectedly instant, quiet pass as suspicious.
- Wrong project ran. The change lives in one test project; CI exercised another. Both green, nothing covered.
The execution gate
Before trusting green, confirm a nonzero count of the tests that cover this change actually executed. If you can't point to the specific tests that ran and passed for the change you made, you don't have a pass. You have an absence of failure, which is not the same thing.
Know which suite owns the change
Map the change to the test project or area that covers it, and run that. "The build is green" without knowing what it exercised is noise.