“Microtest with emotional baggage” is supposed to remind you of working with people who have emotional baggage. You’re trying to talk about some simple thing, and suddenly they fly off the handle because of some connection to some bad experience once. That’s like a microtest that can’t be run unless you instantiate 8000 classes that have nothing to do with the point of the test.
Or: the difficulty of working with people who need constant stroking and validation and support. That’s like a microtest that can’t function without selenium or watir running it against a full browser - even though the only thing the test is about is whether a particular button is hooked into the app correctly.
