Actually I'd agree with your manager. A "Unit Test" does not touch anything external. Everything should be mocked out when "unit" testing.
BUT... Unit testing is only 1/2 the battle (and I now strongly believe the less important half of the battle). Integration testing where you connect all your little pieces together and have them work end to end (including databases and web service calls) is critical to the safety and security of a software development project. When done properly unit tests come and go as the individual units are refactored and sometimes even replaced but it is the integration (regression, smoke, whatever) tests that survive and prove that the entire system still continues to operate. On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 2:43 PM, Tom Whittaker <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have a development manager who wants us to mock almost every single > component our software change interacts with because he insists that > we are suppose to completely isolate our unit test from other > components, which is what he calls a unit test. > > We keep telling him that is not how to write unit tests, but he is the > manager, and so we've been doing it this way. > > For example, I agree with the following web page's "Reasons for use" > of mocks. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mock_object > > Does anyone have the argument that supports the extreme position our > manager is taking? Or better yet, a good book or paper that argues > against this extreme? > > From what I've been seeing, it has created poorer quality software > because we are actually not finding bugs that use our real databases > and external web services until very late in the process. We just had > a feature freeze date, and we found a few major problems that day > largely because everyone was using mocks, and the mocked systems did > not behave the way our mocks did, and the higher level functional > tests created by QA missed a few things that a normal unit test would > of caught had we not been using mocks for everything. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Rhino.Mocks" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/RhinoMocks?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
