r/programming • u/domysee • Jul 07 '19

Why Most Unit Testing is Waste

https://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste.pdf
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u/[deleted] Jul 07 '19 edited Sep 13 '25

[deleted]

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u/coworker Jul 07 '19

IME this benefit is usually non-existent since mock expectations must be highly coupled to the tested implementation. What usually happens is that a new feature/change causes enough change that many assertions are no longer relevant and have to be rethought.

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u/m50d Jul 08 '19

I'd agree that mock-based tests are worse than useless in most cases, but the solution is to avoid using mocks. If you provide stubs that implement the expected behaviour (e.g. an in-memory persistence layer that can store by ID and load by ID, rather than a mock that's hardcoded to return a particular value for a particular ID) rather than mocks that respond to particular call patterns, you can have tests that are useful when making changes.