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The author fails to justify why he "hates mocks" except a hand-waving justification of "they don't test production code". Well, they do, other than the parts th
by mvdtnz 3y ago
The author fails to justify why he "hates mocks" except a hand-waving justification of "they don't test production code". Well, they do, other than the parts that are mocked. They "don't test production code" in the same way that his unit test doesn't test production code because it only touches a fraction of the real code.
I don't disagree with his decomposition, it's correct. I also agree with his approach to unit and integration testing to touch the appropriate layers. It's just his knee-jerk and unjustified hatred of mocks I'm objecting to.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoFor all the hatred of mocks, it seemed strange that the article spent so little time actually talking about them.
- sfn42 3y agoYeah. I completely agree with the part about separating db stuff and logic (it's a huge pet peeve of mine and almost nobody at work does anything like that), but I think mocks do have a place. I also think it's best to make sure the majority of our code doesn't require mocks to test. But very few people do that either even if it's fairly simple. I am fairly fresh with my two years of professional experience and I've spent a lot of energy worrying about whether there's something wrong with me that makes me want to refactor most of the code I read. I'm starting to lean towards the conclusion that it's not my fault, it's just that most devs write shitty code. And I don't think that's javas fault.
- codethief 3y agoYeah, there are so many reasons not to like mocks and he picked… that one?
- manvillej 3y agohonestly, with mocks and good type checking, I don't see why it wouldn't be valid testing