33 tests proved the tool was correct. None asked whether it runs.

Acceptance gaps Your monitoring tool has 33 tests. Every one of them passes. It has also never executed, not once, and nothing in your project will ever tell you. Correct, complete, and never started We built a tool that scans four public sources for conversations where our product belongs. It reads only. It never posts. The acceptance was thorough. 33 checks in total. No write access, no credentials, results filtered for relevance, duplicates removed. A hard cap on output, back off on HTTP 429, and a dead source must not swallow the other three. All 33 passed. The tool shipped. The task promised a list of conversations every morning. There was no schedule. So there was never a list. And a tool that does nothing also reports nothing, so nobody noticed. Why your test suite cannot see this Tests answer questions about behaviour. Given this input, does the code do the right thing? Whether anything ever supplies that input is a different kind of question. It lives in a scheduler, a workflow file, a systemd timer, a queue consumer. Your test suite has no opinion about it. This is why the gap survives review. Reviewers read the diff, and the diff is correct. The missing part is not in the diff at all. Note how ordinary the failure is. Nobody was careless. The work was good. It just was not connected to anything. The question to add to every acceptance What starts this, and how would I know if it stopped? Ask it about every tool you ship that is meant to run on its own. A report, a backup, a sync, a scanner, a cleanup job. It has two halves and both matter. Something must start it. And when it stops starting, that must be visible without anyone going to look. Make it answerable by a machine A question you have to remember to ask gets forgotten. So we wrote a guard that asks it for every tool at once. The rule: any script whose own header says it runs daily must appear in a workflow file that has a schedule. Twelve lines of code, and it covers every tool we will ever add. T