A case against a case against mocking and stubbing
December 11th, 2008
In his blog entitled A case against Mocking and Stubbing, Brian Cardarella says
since I’ve been TATFT with TDD and some BDD I’ve come to believe that mocking/stubbing is a horrible idea and it can hurt the development process
Please take a minute to let that soak in. “a horrible idea” and “can hurt the development process”. In fact, please go read the post before you read on. I’d rather you read his words before you read my interpretation of them.
Back? Cool. Scary stuff, huh?
But never fear, because it’s not about you (unless you are Brian). What he is really saying is this:
since I’ve been TATFT with my own personal approach to testing Rails applications, which is a little bit different from what the TDD/BDD guys are doing and is largely based on Rails conventions which encourage you to couple layers together in your tests, I’ve come to believe that mocking and stubbing, two concepts that assist and encourage testing in isolation, which is the opposite of the kind of testing I like to do, is a horrible idea for me and can hurt my own personal development process
Before I defend my re-phrasing of Brian’s statement, let me say that he does have a couple of really good ideas in the post (specifically about the dilemma of databases), and I don’t intend to convince you that mocking and stubbing are inherently good ideas that will save the world, or that Brian’s process would be improved by adding mocks and stubs to it.
But Brian makes a broad generalization, attacking ideas that many view as inherently useful in the appropriate context, and I feel that the scope of his statement requires a bit of narrowing.
