^To be fair to lava, he says many times, everywhere, that putting power to the driver with a short circuit output would break it, that's the only reason that he says you HAVE to use a test load (unlike the LM317 or rkcstr drivers which, strictly speaking, will still limit current even with no load). The biggest writing on the whole instruction sheet is "Warning: This driver is a current source mode driver. Do not operate it without a load or with a short circuit output, damage to the driver may result."
As long as it wasn't powered on while the short-circuit was in place, it should be ok, as well.
Looking at your photo and at the driver itself, you can see the traces, you can see that shorting to that component inbetween the contacts will short across the contacts themselves, and you can do a continuity test with the contacts and components. Before ever powering on the driver, I ALWAYS do a continuity test on everything. For the Lava drive, I make sure there is continuity from the diode negative pin to the negative battery contact to the negative input contact on the driver, since these are all continuous. Then I also ALWAYS test to make sure the positive and negative diode pins are completely isolated, especially on the lava where a short across the output will kill it.
