Ask HN: What is “negative testing” in a mobile app?

[Aissen]

Following the recent NY Post article about an ex-Meta employee fired over refusing to do negative testing: https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refused-to-do-negative-testing-awsuit/

I wondered what is the exact thing Facebook is doing here ? Running benchmarks on mobile phones ? Testing the OS reaction to edge cases ?

[monsieurpooh]

Yet another utter failure of internet journalism. There are about 10 outlets piling onto this story and each of them said the exact same thing about "testing how fast it loads an image" because no one actually knows what it means and everyone was just copying another article. There's only so many ways one can word some BS if one doesn't even know what it means.

I googled this exact question and was led to this comment. I don't know what it means, but based on another article about negative testing in a more general case, my best guess is they can test whether the phone and their app are still responsive and usable with low battery?

[terminlvelocity]

I give even less credit to the media's understanding here. I suspect that they weren't intentionally draining the battery just to satisfy a test condition and instead were running through random permutations of user actions or something and making sure it didn't result in bugs/slow performance.

I suspect that the engineer's complaint was that running these tests would have the side effect of using up the phone's battery on things that the user did not initiate or knowingly consent to.

If Facebook wanted to test things on phones with low batteries, rather than intentionally drain the batteries first, I suspect that they'd just target phones that happened to have low batteries at the time. That could be troubling, but I'll reserve judgment until we have concrete evidence of that occurring.

You'd think that given their large userbase, they could design tests so that they have miniscule impact on individual users. It's still possible that this is a massive issue worthy of scandal, but until we know more information, I'll take secondhand information from a single disgruntled employee with a grain of salt.

[mongole]

Negative Testing is a misnomer in this case. It’s just a test with expected negative output. The Wikipedia article tells more.

The whole story might be a cover up of an low performer, but also might be the beginning of a new scandal.