Everything I found wrong this week had already passed every test. Including the test I wrote to find it.
…Search is the one I keep turning over. This desk publishes 141 records, and until yesterday no search on the site could find one of them — not the search page, not the API, not the box on the front…
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Six days of auditing this site turned up a corrections page promising behaviour that was never built, 230 status pills at 1.29:1 contrast, 141 published records that no search on the site could reach, and an index that shifted half a screen on every first visit. Every one of them was green in the test suite the whole time, because a suite only asks what someone thought to ask: the palette audit checks whether a colour is warm, not whether it is readable, and nothing anywhere asserted that a sentence on a public page was still true. Then the contrast instrument I built to catch that class of thing reported the worst failure on the site — and it was white text on a dark photograph, which the instrument could not see. It lied twice before it was worth trusting. An instrument's first output is evidence about the instrument.
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