If I already have passing tests for anything function A might do, I can safely assume it will behave the same when called from B, C and D.
How to test without mocking
11–20 of 225 posts
Re: How to test without mocking
#12If you're writing a CRUD app and mocking your database calls instead of just starting an actual Postgres instance before running the tests, you're probably using mocking wrong.
If you're writing a custom frontend for GitHub using the GitHub API and don't bother writing a decent set of mocks for how you expect the GitHub API to behave, your app will quickly require either full manual QA at best or become untestable at worst. Some APIs are very stable, and testing against the API itself can hit rate limiting, bans, and other anti-abuse mechanisms that introduce all kinds of instability to your test suite.
Use the right tools to solve your problems.
Re: How to test without mocking
#13The problem is that mocks are normally used to avoid testing services/outside code. For example making a wrapper around a message system if you don't mock, it tests both your code and the message system. However the the overhead of keeping the mocking system up to date is a pain in the balls.
Testing both your code and the message system is exactly what you want, since if the message system is broken in a way that upstream didn't catch, you want to learn about it during testing and not production, if possible.
Re: How to test without mocking
#14If you're writing a CRUD app and mocking your database calls instead of just starting an actual Postgres instance before running the tests, you're probably using mocking wrong. If you're writing a custom frontend for GitHub using the GitHub API and don't bother writing a decent set of mocks for how you expect the GitHub API to behave, your app will quickly require either full manual QA at best or become untestable at…
When you write tests with mocks you almost always at some point end up with tests that test your mocks lol, and tests that test that you wrote the tests you think you wrote -- not the software itself.
I’ve never been thrilled by tests that rely on mocking — it usually means you need to re-express your module interface boundary.
Mocks for me fall into the class of software I affectionately call “load-bearing paint.” It’s basically universally the wrong tool for any given job but that really doesn’t stop people. Putting in a data class or similar model object and a delegate is usually sufficient and a much better tool.
Re: How to test without mocking
#15> Modelling the happy path is great for refactoring - even a necessity, but doesn’t help with finding bugs.
This is a common misconception (one that I also initially held). Unit tests aren't meant to find bugs, they're meant to protect against regressions, and in doing so, act as a documentation of how a component is supposed to behave in response to different input.
Re: How to test without mocking
#16The problem is that mocks are normally used to avoid testing services/outside code. For example making a wrapper around a message system if you don't mock, it tests both your code and the message system. However the the overhead of keeping the mocking system up to date is a pain in the balls.
Testing both your code and the message system is exactly what you want, since if the message system is broken in a way that upstream didn't catch, you want to learn about it during testing and not production, if possible.
I’m still mad about the time I was told to mock a payment gateway in tests even though they had a testing environment and then got a slew of bug reports from people whose company names had punctuation (and thus failed the name validation the payment gateway was secretly running).
Re: How to test without mocking
#17If you're writing a CRUD app and mocking your database calls instead of just starting an actual Postgres instance before running the tests, you're probably using mocking wrong. If you're writing a custom frontend for GitHub using the GitHub API and don't bother writing a decent set of mocks for how you expect the GitHub API to behave, your app will quickly require either full manual QA at best or become untestable at…
Re. postgres, this is actually something I have always struggled with, so would love to learn how others do it.
I’ve only ever worked in very small teams, where we didn’t really have the resources to maintain nice developer experiences and testing infrastructure. Even just maintaining representative testing data to seed a test DB as schemas (rapidly) evolve has been hard.
So how do you
- operate this? Do you spin up a new postgres DB for each unit test?
- maintain this, eg have good, representative testing data lying around?
Re: How to test without mocking
#18If you inherited a project with no tests at all, mocking is a lifesaver. It allows you to only worry about specific aspects of the application so you can start writing and running tests. I agree though that if not done properly, it can be overused and can make your tests practically worthless.
Re: How to test without mocking
#19The problem is that mocks are normally used to avoid testing services/outside code. For example making a wrapper around a message system if you don't mock, it tests both your code and the message system. However the the overhead of keeping the mocking system up to date is a pain in the balls.
Testing both your code and the message system is exactly what you want, since if the message system is broken in a way that upstream didn't catch, you want to learn about it during testing and not production, if possible.
I would want to seperate those tests. You want to know what has failed. Also depends on how many tests you have.
Re: How to test without mocking
#20[flagged]