Unit Testing Clarified

Only programmers do unit testing, which is no concern to software testers (QA team).

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This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series.

In software testing, there are many terminologies that are used wrongly by IT professionals. In this article, I will talk about ‘Unit Testing’, which is misused a lot in software projects.

Unit testing is a type of white box testing performed by programmers at the source code level. Software testers (QA team) should have no concerns about it. A more correct term for ‘Unit Testing’ would be “Programmer Test” (I didn’t invent this term, I read it from a book. Pitifully, I forgot the name of that book).

Last week, an IT manager showed me their release document, which has “QA unit testing” (by manual testers). I pointed out the error. This manager was quite open-minded and corrected it immediately: “QA functional testing”. I have seen this mistake many times; however, not everyone was willing to admit that. Though I don’t remember anyone argue on this (the mistake was so obvious), a common response from the tech leads: “put aside the differences of the terminology, blah blah blah, …”. Frankly, I have lost interest in listening to a tech lead…