npm provides a common interface for running package scripts: http://npmjs.org/doc/scripts.html

So if you open the package.json (https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey/blob/master/package.jso...) you'll see that `test` runs `make test`.

Check out the Makefile (https://github.com/cloudkick/whiskey/blob/master/Makefile) to see what `npm test` is doing. This abstracts out the test command, because you could be running `cake test`, `make test`, `node whiskey test`, etc. and if you're just using the node package, you probably don't care what the command is, you just want to run the tests. `npm test` is the way to do it.