Subject

The "Subject" or "Subject Under Test" or even "SUT" is a term used for "the production code being tested by this test". It's not a particularly meaningful or descriptive name, but it's consistent, and it's what the xUnit Patterns book defined, so it's the one I suggest using—both in conversation and in naming.

Put simply, I recommend naming the variable of whatever is being tested subject in all cases. This yields two immediate benefits:

• Readers of the test familiar with the "subject" meme will be able to identify the thing being tested, even if the test is otherwise long, unwieldy, and hard to navigate
• Extract refactors of code from the subject into new first-class units will be less disruptive, as the identifiers won't need to be changed for the tests to be excised and placed in a new listing

Support by tools

Some frameworks have even codified subject as a built-in feature, like RSpec:

class Foo
  def bar
    "HI"
  end
end

describe Foo
  it "works" do
    expect(subject.bar).to eq("HI")
  end
end

Where subject is an instance of Foo created by RSpec automatically, as if the user had defined let(:subject) { Foo.new }. Note that the instantiation of subject can be customized by passing a block like subject { Foo.new(1234) }.

Criticism

Interestingly, RSpec's maintainer at the time wrote that he believed using subject was a code smell, preferring that each test arrive at its own expressive name for the thing being tested.

It's my opinion that, expressive as that approach may be, every name in a system represents an additional concept and an indirection to be mentally unfurled. Using subject is an opportunity to slightly reduce the cognitive load required to understand a given test, and since that's of greater concern in most test suites, it's worth the trade-off in expressiveness. As a result, providing a custom name to the subject smells like an instance of accidental creativity.