Many testers will tell you that they eventually had to work with their development group to draw the line between unit testing and functional testing. This, of course, implies that there is some sort of a difference between the two. And, in fact, if you go by the literature — professional or otherwise — of the testing industry, there supposedly is a difference.

I’ve just never liked that fact because “functional” is such a broad term. To my way of thinking, unit testing is a form of functional testing. I think testers who use the term “functional” as a separating category within tests are stuck in an “old school” mode of thinking.