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Re:How deep are your unit tests? by Silhouette on Monday December 10, 2012 @09:03AM (#4898990)
That may be true, but sometimes it can also be a pain when you are talking to everything through a load of abstraction layers.

Exactly. Sometimes the benefit of a certain kind of test does not outweigh the cost of distorting a useful design so it will support the test code. That cost might be directly in terms of performance overhead, or it can be a more subtle overhead through (for example) weakening language-enforced modularity in your architecture so you can insert mock/stub placeholders where you want them for testing purposes, which can hurt everything from maintenance overheads to the effectiveness of code reviews.

Re:How deep are your unit tests? by jiggy2011 on Monday December 10, 2012 @09:12AM (#4899031)
I think dependency injection is designed to mostly solve that problem but with that you want to program in a very specific way (e.g calling the DI framework's factory methods rather than just using "new" and a constructor method).

This makes it more difficult to retrofit to code and is sort of awkward when you are integrating with different bits of code and libraries that don't use DI.

Thus the usefulness of mocking frameworks to "force" a particular class to be a certain implementation for the purposes of testing.

Re:How deep are your unit tests? by meaty on Monday December 10, 2012 @11:03AM (#4899611)
Hint: You never have to distort a design for testing, if it's not a crock. It's a great indicator of brokeness.
Re:How deep are your unit tests? by Silhouette on Monday December 10, 2012 @01:29PM (#4900682)
That's not a hint, it's a conceit, born in the kind of fantasy world that drinks whatever folks like Bob Martin are selling and loves names like SimpleBeanFactoryAwareAspectInstanceFactory and functions no more than five lines long.

In the real world, software architecture is the servant of many masters, often including multiple kinds of testing, and sometimes you can't do everything that each of them would like all at the same time. For a start, they can be objectively contradictory: every time you add a dedicated test hook or introduce inversion of control to support unit testing, for example, you have also created additional cases that need to be considered during a code review.

However, it's important to remember that all these testing methods and design techniques are merely means to an end. They are valuable precisely to the extent that they help us build software to do useful things, and no more. If they sometimes conflict, that's OK, as long as we favour the one that most helps us to get the job done. However, things tend to go wrong if we start nerfing one aspect just because dogma says we must not compromise on another.