> Unit tests with real dependencies That's an integration test. These are integration tests. You're literally testing multiple units (e.g., Redis, and the thin

> Unit tests with real dependencies That's an integration test. These are integration tests. You're literally testing multiple units (e.g., Redis, and the thing using Redis) to see if they're integrating. Why do we even have words. These are valuable in their own right. They're just complicated & often incredibly slow compared to a unit test. Which is why I prefer mocks, too: they're speedy. You just have to get the mock right … and that can be tricky, particularly since some APIs are just woefully underdocumented, or the documentation is just full of lies. But the mocks I've written in the past steadily improve over time. Learn to stop worrying, and love each for what they are. (Our CI system actually used to pretty much directly support this pattern. Then we moved to Github Actions. GHA has "service containers", but unfortunately the feature is too basic to address real-world use cases: it assumes a container image can just … boot! … and only talk to the code via the network. Real world use cases often require serialized steps between the test & the dependencies, e.g., to create or init database dirs, set up certs, etc.)