There’s an idea doing the rounds that the “unit” in “unit test” means the unity of the test, rather than a test of a software unit. Moreover, that it originally meant this, and that anyone who says “unit test” to mean the test of a software unit is misguided.
Here’s the report of the 1968 NATO conference on software engineering. On their page 20 (as marked, not as in the PDF) is a diagram of a waterfall-esque system development process, featuring these three phases among others (emphasis mine):
- unit design
- unit development
- unit test
“Unit” meaning software unit is used throughout.
