Dry run
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A dry run is a testing process where the effects of a possible failure are intentionally mitigated. For example, the individuals who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US prepared for their missions by staging dry runs on the same flights before the actual attack.
In computer studies, a dry run is a mental run of a program, where the programmer examines the source code one step at a time and determines what it will do when run.
The usage of "dry run" in acceptance procedures (for example in the so called FAT = Factory Acceptance Procedure) is meant as following: the factory (which is a subcontractor) must perform a complete test of the system it has to deliver BEFORE the actual acceptance from the contractor side.
For a script that is expected to modify the data in a database, a dry run would not actually alter the data, but give an indication on how many records would be updated.
