Unit Testing As Claim Validation

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." - Archimedes (Mathematician and inventor of ancient Greece, 280-211BC)

A function is much like Archimedes's lever, a block of code that claims that it will do something if some things have already been done. A unit test should ensure that the function can actually do exactly what it claims to, when all its conditions are met.

The definition of a function, no matter how complex it is, can be decomposed as
1) Preconditions (Conditions/Environment)- Things which must be done or conditions which must prevail when the function is called. These might include constraints on the input parameters and global state variables.
2) Body (Action) - The main block of code which achieves the functionality.
3) Postconditions (Side-effects)- Things that the function will ensure by the time the body of the function finishes executing. These can be the function's return value or the modification of the state of the system.

Unit-tests should determine whether all the postconditions are fulfilled when all the preconditions are fulfilled by the caller of the function. It is important to remember that unit-tests are more like mathematical verification of the function-model; they check whether the code conforms to the definition of the functions.