How Hidden Assumptions in Code Logic Quietly Change the Answers You Get

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A developer building a tool to track unanswered comments found that three different versions of the same tool returned three different counts — 18, 34, and 2 — each technically correct by its own logic. The discrepancy arose because each version had silently encoded a different definition of what it means for a comment to be 'answered.' The insight, developed through a two-month exchange with another developer named Pascal, is that implementation decisions embed judgements that quickly become invisible once the code is written. The article uses mutation testing as a parallel example, where a test that never fails may not be proving correctness but simply failing to observe the behaviour it was meant to guard. Across both cases, the core problem is the same: code, tests, and documentation can all reinforce the same flawed assumption simultaneously without anyone noticing.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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