I have found in my world it is easy to setup a test database (we use sqlite!) and the file system is fast enough (I have code to force using a different directory for files). I have been playing with starting a dbus server on a different port in my tests and then starting the real server to test against (with mixed results - I need a better way to know when dbus is running). I have had great success by writing a fake for one service that is painful - the fake tracks the information I really care about and so lets me query on things that matter not what the function signature was.

I'm not arguing that mocks don't have their place. However I have found that by declaring I won't use them at all I overall come up with better solutions and thus better tests.

Exactly! This one gets it, real communism has never been tried! On another note I do not think that it is tiresome at all, that any critique of any pattern/teqnique in SWE, always is meet with the "you are holding it wrong" rebutle.

Do you not believe it's possible to hold something wrong? If someone is a skilled and experienced golfer, it's quite believable that they won't automatically be a skilled tennis player after three months of tennis playing. If someone is an experienced race car driver, they won't automatically be a skilled member of a basketball team. "You must be holding it wrong" can sometimes take years of practising holding it right, not just minutes or months.

If a team of people who have been SWEs for decades reports that something helped their team, and you try it and it doesn't work, and you have been SWEs for decades, that doesn't automatically mean they are charlatans selling nonsense. They might all be basketball players playing together for 5 years and you might be a team of a baseball player, a racecar driver, a track and field athlete, and a water polo player, trying to play basketball from only reading about it, with nobody who has done it or experienced it, and several people who quietly don't want to be playing it and are just nodding along while hoping it fails. The conclusion that they are liars and it can't possibly work is not a strong conclusion.

When I look close I discover that those people who tried agile and found it worked either were on a much smaller projects with much simpler problems than large projects have; or they are not telling the full truth about agile. (sometimes both). I'm glad agile works for small projects, but it doesn't scale very well seems clear from all the large projects that have tried it and have gone back in major ways (generally not all the way back). The people who have failed projects still often sing the praises of agile, but we have no idea if the project would have failed if something else had been used.