Testing for Deriving Observable State of Software Systems

Software tests commonly verify selected behavior under controlled conditions. Production operation poses another question: can responsible observers determine what happened, when, under which authority, with which effects, and within what uncertainty? A system can pass behavioral tests while its receipts, event transport, storage, derivations, health indicators, or observation surfaces are missing, stale, corrupted, misleading, or inaccessible. This paper develops Testing as Observability Expansion within the proposed DSS:OS:TEST domain. It treats a test as a bounded evidence artifact supporting a declared claim under a scenario, environment, oracle, observation regime, and inference range. Tests do not generally prove that software "can be known"; they can test specified links in an evidence path and reveal untested or failed regions. The revised architecture replaces an absolute evidence hierarchy with a dependency graph, treats seven evidence classes as overlapping facets, defines an evidence-path contract and a Constitutional Test Runner report, and makes observability closure relative to a declared claim inventory and profile. It integrates witness semantics, receipt-based reasoning, epistemic situational awareness, and meta-binding tests while preserving their distinct roles.