  The death of massive stars is shrouded in many mysteries. One of them is the
mechanism that overturns the collapse of the degenerate iron core into an
explosion, a process that determines the supernova explosion energy, properties
of the surviving compact remnant, and the nucleosynthetic yields. The number of
core-collapse supernova observations has been growing with an accelerating pace
thanks to modern time-domain astronomical surveys and new tests of the
explosion mechanism are becoming possible. We review predictions of
parameterized supernova explosion models and compare them with explosion
properties inferred from observed light curves, spectra, and neutron star
masses.
