Recently, I’ve been working hard to plug one of the biggest holes in my game … testing. I stumbled across this article, which helped make a lot of things clear for me, with respect to mocking and its relation to Unit testing.

This is partially due to the fact that most geeks don’t actually know what a unit test is. They think that testing the methods of a specific class constitutes a unit test, but that’s only part of the story. A unit test test is when you test the methods of a specific class in isolation, and the difference is critical. You know how some people call us “computer scientists”. Yeah, well this is the science part.

If you’re not doing this, you are not unit testing. That’s not meant to deride what you’re doing. I mean that as a literal statement of fact. Anyone, for example, who is using the built in Rails “unit” testing framework with fixtures (or FactoryGirl fixtures) is guilty of this. No test that relies on a separate class, or API, or interfaces with a database in any way is a unit test. It is an integration test (some people call them functional test), and when something goes wrong it is just a matter of time before it misleads you.

Enjoy the article – The Thing about Mock Objects