alt Hacker NewsI can’t concur with this enough.
I’ve been on projects where mocking _literally made the project less reliable_ because people ended up “testing” against mocks that didn’t accurately reflect the behavior of the real APIs.
It left us with functionality that wasn’t actually tested and resulted in real bugs and regressions that shipped.
Mocking is one of these weird programmer pop-culture memetic viruses that spread in the early 2000s and achieved complete victory in the 2010s, like Agile and OOP, and now there are entire generations of devs who it’s not that they’re making a bad or a poorly argued choice, it’s that they literally don’t even know there are other ways of thinking about these problems because these ideas have sucked all the oxygen out of the room.
> like Agile and OOP
Ha.
I think there's room to argue "Agile" is a popular bastardisation of what's meant by "agile software development", and with "OOP" we got the lame Java interpretation rather than the sophisticated Smalltalk interpretation. -- Or I might think that these ideas aren't that good if their poor imitations win out over the "proper" ideas.
With mocking.. I'm willing to be curious that there's some good/effective way of doing it. But the idea of "you're just testing that the compiler works" comes to mind.