In a project I once worked, we were required by company standards to write formal test specifications for manual testing. It was a lot of overhead to write these Word documents and get them through the bureaucracy. Finally, we proposed to write the test specifications as comments inside functional unit tests. That way, we could maintain the test documents easily. We saved a lot of work, and the documents got higher quality because it was easier to update them. And it really helped us to write good unit tests that covered the functionality. In this post, I will take this approach one step further to show how unit tests and manual tests can be unified. In an earlier post Example driven development , I argued that a few simple examples can be used for requirements, manual testing and unit testing. I don't say that a few examples are sufficient as a requirements specification, but they may be in relatively simple projects. And it is far better than nothing. Examples help you to thi