The practice of using Mock Objects in automated software testing is examined from a critical point of view and found to be highly problematic. Opinions of some well known industry speakers are cited. The supposed benefits of Mock Objects are shown to be either no real benefits, or achievable via alternative means.
An automated software testing technique is presented which solves the fragile test problem of white-box testing by allowing us to ensure that the component-under-test interacts with its collaborators according to our expectations without having to stipulate our expectations as test code, without having the tests fail each time our expectations change, and without having to go fixing test code each time this happens.
Let me get one thing out of the way first: I am open to Test-Driven Development (TDD). I am not currently practicing it, because when I gave it a try some time ago it did not seem to work for me, but I do not have any objections to it in principle, so I might give it another try in the future. Let us just say that it was not love at first sight, but then again some relationships do take some time to warm up.
Having said that, let me now express a few reasons why I am skeptical of TDD. The previous paragraph should have established that I am not trashing TDD, I am just expressing some reservations.
The origins of the debate go so far back that they are lost in the mists of time, but a good starting point (which contains references to prior debate) is an Internet Draft from 2018 titled Terminology, Power, and Inclusive Language in Internet-Drafts and RFCs. Some especially woke communities like the Python community had already started applying some of the recommendations in this draft as early as 2019, but things really picked up steam in 2020, with the murder of George Floyd.
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Over the decades, numerous software system architectures have emerged which require invocations across subsystems to be done via message-passing instead of programmatic interface method calls. Such architectures are so common that many programmers have come to regard message-passing as an end in and of itself, oblivious of the fact that it is nothing but a (poor) technical mechanism for accomplishing a certain architectural goal.
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A mechanism is described for automatically converting method invocations of
any programmatic interface into a single-method normal form and
converting back to invocations of the original interface, so that
general-purpose operations can be performed on the normal form without
explicit knowledge of the interface being invoked. Implementations are
provided for C# and for Java.
This is only of interest to people who are into Stack Overflow.
Have you ever wondered why Stack Overflow is exactly the way it is? Here are some insights.
(Note: this presentation violates one of the cardinal rules of presentations, which is to avoid long texts, so here is a tip: ignore every screen that contains a long text, just listen to what Jeff Atwood is saying.)
Note: as I look at him, I can't help but think that all he is missing is the upward curved tie, i.e. he has to be the real-life person after whom Dilbert was fashioned.
