This is an idea I've had which would be a really nice advance for my field: parsing and scraping public government legal texts. I'm wondering what others have done like this.

Unfortunately, when I search for "self-testing software" I get only _automated testing_ ... even Martin Fowler using self-testing as a synonym for it: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SelfTestingCode.html.

Thanks!

----

Details for the curious:

I have the problem of false positives when (say) the Nevada legislature changes the format of a statute. My program completes without error, but the output isn't correct. (My take-away: I've allowed an illegal state to become representable, and my code needs to change.)

But I noticed something interesting: when I update my text fixtures (they're full copies of a few of the Nevada HTML input files), I get test failures! This is great --- no false positives here. And it's nice confirmation for me that I've got a good test suite. (I did write this code using TDD and was careful not to code ahead of my tests.)

And so I had a thought: I could automate this. When I run the app ( https://github.com/public-law/nevada-revised-statutes-parser ) for real, it can update these fixture files and re-run the test suite to see if it still holds up against any recent changes. This wouldn't be a 100% guarantee of correctness because the source texts may have changed in some way that happens to avoid my tests. But it definitely would have saved me in this situation --- instead of finding the error way down the line with the data already in use.