Mocks, Fakes, Stubs - why bother?

Ever wondered why there are so many different names for the objects that mimic behaviour of the 'real' objects in a system - mocks, stubs, fakes, doubles...

I can't help looking at the tables of definitions on this page and think why bother!

Why have all these mocking frameworks gone and raised the bar of understanding for people who don't like TDD or who don't currently do TDD. To me everything is a mock if it's not the real thing - pure and simple. So when I write tests I call everything a 'Mock' so the tests are easy to read & understand by the anyone (including people adverse to TDD). Prehaps this is one of the reasons why I've stopped using mocking frameworks in general.

I'm sure some people think the distinction between a stub and mock is important but it isn't, the test is important not what & how you mock.



Awkward Coder

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Distributed Systems are Coupled - Period!

If you're doing distributed systems development your systems will be coupled together - period! You can't get away from this statement it's a fact of life. Now how much you're coupled is another question.

After the revelation I had last week that most REST systems aren't REST at all and are in fact just over-elaborated RPC (oh look we've reinvented CORBA again!) - link. I've come to the conclusion that REST systems aren't easy to implement and anyone who tells me otherwise doesn't know anything about distributed systems!

If REST systems were as easy people would make you believe why are so many not classed as REST by Dr. Fielding...


Awkward Coder

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Devlicio.us boys run out of duct tape!

trying to reply to a blog about duct tape programmers and guess what ;)




Awkward Coder

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Test Harnesses are counter productive...

How often do you hear:

'Why do I need to write tests when I've got a perfectly good test harness?'

Now I hear this often and I'm not surprised anymore when I hear it, it's a sign of a dis-functional team where team members don't value the team they only value their output.

I've highlighted the words that give it away:

'Why do I need to write tests when I've got a perfectly good test harness...'

There is no 'I' in 'TEAM'!

Anyone who insists test harnesses are just as good as automated tests is plain wrong.

They're selfish developers who only care about the code they've written - and probably don't get involved with the team. The reason it's selfish is because they might well be able to test all edge cases with their test harness but how is anyone else meant to know how to achieve this. They can't unless they understand exactly how the test harness is constructed and to be used. It's more productive from a team point of view for everyone to write automated tests that are run automatically on checkin & build.

Now more than likely the people who refuse the accept TDD methods are either 'duct tapers' or 'old timers' who in general are past their sell by date anyway - if you can't accept knew ideas then you are definitely in the wrong industry.

At all the 'old timers' - do doctors still regularly recommend leaches?



Awkward Coder

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So you thinking you're doing TDD?

I work freelance and like most freelancers I change job relatively frequently so therefore I do a lot of interviews. One thing I've noticed when being the interviewee is the amount companies lie!

One of the common technical lies I hear is 'We use TDD, all code is under test and we run automated builds...'

I use to take this at face value - being a trusting fellow and not wanting to judge someone to quickly ;)

So if I want to know how much truth is in the statement I could follow up by asking about mocking frameworks, BDD & Dan North etc...

But the killer question for me is to ask about their usage of an IoC container. Now IoC containers have nothing to do directly with TDD but If you're doing TDD you'll be using Dependency Injection and therefore you'll at least considered using one when you've realised your classes start to have to many constructor arguments.

So if they dismiss the usage of IoC without a good reason I know they aren't telling the truth about TDD - it's acceptable not to use IoC in an application you just have to be able to justify it, like every other decision one makes in development.



Awkward Coder...

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I know nothing moments...

I was researching RESTful APIs today, it's couple of months since I worked on a RESTful project and I'm thinking of doing a small project with a RESTful API.

I discovered this link and found out that all my previous RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful ;)

So after discussing this on Yahoo groups I feel like I know nothing about REST now :(


Feeling stoopid now...


Awkward Coder

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The secret all developers should know...

Dave Laribee gives away the secret ingredient!

http://codebetter.com/blogs/david_laribee/archive/2009/09/08/the-secret-sauce.aspx

nuff said...

Awkward Coder

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