As I* understand it the only "traditional" engineering field with anything close to unit testing is electronic engineering. Lots of chip or circuit design packa

As I* understand it the only "traditional" engineering field with anything close to unit testing is electronic engineering. Lots of chip or circuit design packages let you automatically test small parts of your design. For mechanical/civil projects, this approach is less common. I think that's partly because of the projects' nature (good luck unit testing a submarine!) and partly because of the engineers being more traditional, and further from the software industry. This said, I can envision some cool things you might do by taking a CAD package and associating some (automatically updating) equations with various parts' critical dimensions. This might act a bit like unit testing. A check of total mass would be another such useful check. * Engineering student with some work experience, but by no means a blooded engineer.