What is “negative testing” in a mobile app?

Question

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 · Accepted Answer

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?

mongole · Answer

Negative Testing is a misnomer in this case. It&rsquo;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.