In this case it might not be needed, but some controllers have calls that are made on initialisation (like NgResource) which makes harder to use $httpBackend (y

In this case it might not be needed, but some controllers have calls that are made on initialisation (like NgResource) which makes harder to use $httpBackend (you have to mock all calls if you want to verify that no calls were left at the end). I took the article more like best-practice for unit testing controllers. But truth to be told, it would be nicer if author would explain why to initialise controller in a method etc.