Eric M Russell (8/23/2016)

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It sounds like you're describing some specific implementation of unit testing within SSDT or Visual Studio.

Unit Testing a stored procedure, generally speaking, is when you execute a stored procedure using a set of input parameters and then confirm that the output or sequence of DML operations match a documented result. This can be done manually though a SSMS query window or using a special unit testing tool.

For example, here I'm unit testing a procedure called usp_CityPopulation_List, confirming the result contains the top 5 populated cities in the US ranked in descending order by population size.

EXEC usp_CityPopulation_List @country = 'US', @toprank = 5;

New York 8,550,405

Los Angeles 3,971,883

Chicago 2,720,546

Houston 2,296,224

Philadelphia 1,567,442

I typically include a few unit tests within the header comments of my stored procedures.