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bulatb

Honestly I'd probably resist this too. Maybe you could practice on me? Help see the benefit?

I'm seeing three main points in this advice:

1. Don't misuse mocks. (Mocks, fakes, whatever.)

2. Write testable, well-factored code with pluggable dependencies.

3. Don't use mocks at all. Use "nullables" instead.

I'm totally on board with (1) and (2) as good advice in general, no matter how you're testing. But (3) seems like an independent choice. What benefit does (3) specifically deliver that you wouldn't get with (1) and (2) and mocks instead of nullables?

I'm ready to admit I'm missing something, but I don't see it.

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I'll give it a try.

The beauty of the nullable approach is that when you're testing the system under test (SUT), you're testing it together with its dependencies. Not just that - you're running the real production code of the dependencies (including transitive dependencies!), just with a off switch toggled.

What the off switch does is really just prevent side effects, like making actual HTTP requests to the outside world or reading bytes from the file system. Using embedded stub makes this a breeze (another revelation for me).

For example, while building the "/v1/add-account" endpoint, you write a test for the request handler function. If you write this test using Shore's approach, you'll exercise the whole tree of dependencies, down to the leaves.

This is what is meant by sociable tests - the SUT isn't isolated from its dependencies. It's the real code all the way down, except that you're calling createNull() instead of create() to instantiate the classes. There are many benefits here, but to me the most important ones are: (1) you don't need to write mocks as separate classes, (2) you can catch errors that arise in the interplay of the various classes or modules and (3) as a result you get a lot more confidence that everything is still working after refactoring.

A sociable microtest is a little like an integration test, but you don't exercise any out-of-process dependencies (perhaps with the exception of the RDBMS) so the tests run in milliseconds rather than seconds.

You commented elsewhere that you're worried about the separation of test code and prod code. Yes, this is a bit of a holy cow that I also had trouble adapting to. It turns out, having test-focused code mixed in with your prod classes is totally fine. I'd perhaps prefer a cleaner separation but honestly it's not a big issue in practice.

Thanks, this helped me understand some things. Unfortunately I don't have time to write a real reply right now, but I think I'm more convinced than before. Thanks for taking the time.

I'm all aboard this, in fact it's how I like to write my "unit" tests, but still I'm unsure about this nullable and test code with prod.

What I do is I simply mock as little as possible (leaf nodes such as timers, remote calls, sometimes RDBMS/filesystem, ...). But I'm not sure what embedding the mock in the prod code gains you? I wonder if part of it is down to the language used?

For instance it says "Put the stub in the same file as the rest of your code so it’s easy to remember and update when your code changes.". Maybe it's because they're using a dynamic language? I'm using C++, so any change in interface will fail to compile the mock, making this less important. You could change the behaviour whilst keeping the same interface, but it's very rare in my experience (and definitely should be avoided).

Nullable I could see some values in some cases where you also want to be able to disable a functionality in prod. But in that case you have a function in the interface to turn it off, so you might as well use that. I can see where using Nullable in construction avoids having to expose this method through the whole dependency tree, but at the same time you lose the ability to dynamically turn in on/off.

I think the big benefit comes from hiding implementation details away from tests. Here—let me copy-paste an example I used elsewhere in this thread:

---

With mock injection:

    m = new FooMock()
    m.call("Bar", 1, 2)
    m.call("Baz", 3)
    p = new Thing(m)
    actual = p.doSomething()
    assert(expected == actual)

With a test-specific factory method:

    p = Thing::makeTestThing(1, 2, 3)  // static method
    actual = p.doSomething()
    assert(expected == actual)

With the test-specific factory, mocked dependencies are encapsulated by Thing. You can configure the their behaviour by passing different parameters to the factory method, but implementation details like `m.call("Bar", 1, 2)` are hidden. The test doesn't need to know that `doSomething` calls `Foo.Bar`.

I'm not sure whether the author of the article would consider `Thing` to be a nullable if `makeTestThing` uses a conventional, automatically-generated `FooMock` under the hood, but I don't think it really matters. To me, the big benefit comes from `Thing` assuming the responsibility to configure and inject its own mocks.

Part of testing is risk management. With mocks you run the risk of the behaviour of your mocks being out of sync with the actual systems you’re mocking. By moving the test-time behaviour closer to the runtime behaviour, you reduce that risk somewhat. If you have other ways of managing that risk or you just never see that happening, you’re good.

The value-add for (3) is that "nullables" encapsulate all the fiddly details that mocks (tend to) expose.

Here's an example. With mock injection:

    m = new FooMock()
    m.call("Bar", 1, 2)
    m.call("Baz", 3)
    p = new Thing(m)
    actual = p.doSomething()
    assert(expected == actual)

With a test-specific factory method:

    p = Thing::makeTestThing(1, 2, 3)  // static method
    actual = p.doSomething()
    assert(expected == actual)

You can use mocks, however, I found in practice that hand written fake implementations (aka Nullables) are much easier to maintain.

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