On: Testing Without Mocks

[Aeolun]

Mocks are for objects, stubs are for responses and ‘fakes’ are basically the same thing as mocks.

[Cyph0n → Aeolun]

Fakes are not mocks. A fake is an actual (simplified) implementation of the dependency.

For example, if your dependency is a distributed key-value store, a fake would expose the same API but using an in-memory hashmap under the hood.

[Aeolun → Cyph0n]

Yeah no, that’s a mock. At least, that’s been a mock ever since I started prgramming 15 years ago. Only later did libraries that automatically mock dependencies appear (and I presume people suddenly felt a need for a new name for not-automatically mocked dependencies?