[voiceofunreason]

<< Originally, the term “unit” in “unit test” referred not to the system under test but to the test itself. >>

Retroactive continuity - how does it work?

For today's lucky 10,000: "unit test", as a label, was in wide use prior to the arrival of the Extreme Programming movement in the late 1990s. And the "unit" in question was the test subject.

But, as far as I can tell, _Smalltalk_ lacked a testing culture (Beck, 1994), so perhaps the testing community's definitions weren't well represented in Smalltalk spaces.

"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered."

(Not particularly fair to single out this one author - this origin myth has been common during the last 10 years or so.)

[jdougan]

At my job we wrote tests in Smalltalk and that was before Kent's work. It wasn't the later tests-first discipline. If I recall correctly write tests later was fairly common then in ST shops. SUnit also had the virtue of standardizing the terminology and testing frameworks.