I was on site with some clients the other day, and they asked me about unit testing and mock objects. I decided to write up some of the discussion we had as a tutorial on creating dependencies (collaborators) for unit testing. We discuss two options, stubbing and mock objects and give some simple examples that illustrate the usage, and the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.

It is common in unit tests to mock or stub collaborators of the class under test so that the test is independent of the implementation of the collaborators. It is also a useful thing to be able to do to control precisely the test data that are used by the test, and verify that the unit is behaving as expected.

Author: Dave Syer
Published: January 15, 2007