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I would consider needing to mock a lot of objects to write your test a form of design feedback. An indication that our design could be improved. Perhaps the cod

I would consider needing to mock a lot of objects to write your test a form of design feedback. An indication that our design could be improved. Perhaps the code under test has too many responsibilities, we're missing an abstraction, boundaries are in the wrong place, too many side effects. One of the downsides of modern mocking frameworks being so easy to use is that it's less obvious when we're doing too much of it. If we test drive the behaviour, our first failing test of a single behaviour won't involve many collaborators. If it does we're probably trying to test more than one thing at once. At some point as we add tests we may add more collaborators. If we refactor at each time we should be asking ourselves what's going wrong. Testing more than one class at the same time doesn't make it an integration test. Arbitrarily restricting a unit to map to a single method or a class is a good way to ensure that your test code is tightly coupled to the implementation.

Scarblac 7y ago
> Testing more than one class at the same time doesn't make it an integration test. Arbitrarily restricting a unit to map to a single method or a class is a good way to ensure that your test code is tightly coupled to the implementation. But at least if you restrict your units to a single method, you have a chance of getting somewhat complete tests. If you're testing multiple classes with several methods each as a unit, the number of possible code paths is so huge that you know you cannot possibly test more than a small part of the possibilities.
- benjiweber 7y ago
  This doesn't have to be the case. If you TDD your implementation then it's all covered by tests. If you refactor as part of the TDD process then you may factor out other classes and methods from the implementation. These are still covered by the same tests but don't have their own microtests.

Scarblac 7y ago

> Testing more than one class at the same time doesn't make it an integration test. Arbitrarily restricting a unit to map to a single method or a class is a good way to ensure that your test code is tightly coupled to the implementation. But at least if you restrict your units to a single method, you have a chance of getting somewhat complete tests. If you're testing multiple classes with several methods each as a unit, the number of possible code paths is so huge that you know you cannot possibly test more than a small part of the possibilities.

benjiweber 7y ago
This doesn't have to be the case. If you TDD your implementation then it's all covered by tests. If you refactor as part of the TDD process then you may factor out other classes and methods from the implementation. These are still covered by the same tests but don't have their own microtests.