>> we shouldn't call this 'testing'.
>>
>> If anything, it is 'excercising' the application.
>
> Testing, or exercising, the application is such a common activity at each
> stage of the application lifecycle. As this thread makes clear, it's about
> much more than just running some unit tests when you build your jar.
Testing is part of the build. That goes without saying.
But calling the application with various inputs (here: timeouts) until it
occasionally responds correctly once (!) doesn't deserve any special place in
the build.
The next time, you call the same functionality with the same parameters, it may
just fail again
because the server is under higher load or now serves _two_ users or so...
The maximum info that you can get out of this approach is: "works occasionally
but you cannot rely on it".
I know, people do it, but that doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do
and that we should contribute to misleading users into thinking there would be
"tests" in the build.
cheers
Dierk
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