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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Wow. If "unit" in "unit test" does indeed mean that the test itself should be able to run independent of the other tests then maybe I can get over my avoidance of calling them "unit tests"!

I dislike that term because the most valuable tests I write are inevitably more in the shape of integration tests - tests that exercise just one function/class are probably less than 10% of the tests that I write.

So I call my tests "tests", but I get frustrated that this could be confused with manual tests, so then I call them "automated tests" but that's a bit of a mouthful and not a term many other people use.

I'd love to go back to calling them "unit tests", but I worry that most people who hear me say that will still think I'm talking about the test-a-single-unit-of-code version.

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"I call them 'unit tests' but they don't match the accepted definition of unit tests very well." -- Kent Beck, __Test Driven Development By Example__

The short version is that "unit test" did actually mean something (see Glenford Myers, __The Art of Software Testing__ or Boris Beizer, __Software Testing Techniques__), although it wasn't necessarily clear how those definitions applied to object-oriented programming (see Robert Binder, __Testing Object-Oriented Systems__).

The Test-First/TDD/XP community later made an effort to pivot to the language of "programmer test", but by the time that effort began it was already too late.

So I think you should continue to call your tests "tests" (or "checks", if you prefer the framing of James Bach and Michael Bolton).

As best I can tell - there's no historicity to the idea that "unit test" was a reference to the isolation of a tests from its peers; it's just a ret-con.

Ive had this experience with team-specific vocab where certain terms organically end up having terms with two or more conflicting meanings and it was horrendous. It led to all sorts of bugs, misunderstandings and even arguments.

Even worse, most people didnt realize there was a problem coz they always knew what they meant.

The only time I managed to work past it was by convincing everyone to never use that term again - burning it to the ground - and agreeing to replace it with two or more new, unambiguous terms.

Id love to burn "unit test" and "integration test" to the ground but nobody outside my team listens to me :)

Id probably replace them with:

* code coupled

* interface coupled

* high level

* low level

* xUnit

* faked infrastructural

* deployed infrastructural

* hermetic / non hermetic

* declarative / non declarative

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