What's the difference between faking, mocking,

Question

I know how I use these terms, but I'm wondering if there are accepted definitions for faking, mocking, and stubbing for unit tests? How do you define these for your tests? Describe situations where you might use each.

Here is how I use them:

Fake: a class that implements an interface but contains fixed data and no logic. Simply returns "good" or "bad" data depending on the implementation.

Mock: a class that implements an interface and allows the ability to dynamically set the values to return/exceptions to throw from particular methods and provides the ability to check if particular methods have been called/not called.

Stub: Like a mock class, except that it doesn't provide the ability to verify that methods have been called/not called.

Mocks and stubs can be hand generated or generated by a mocking framework. Fake classes are generated by hand. I use mocks primarily to verify interactions between my class and dependent classes. I use stubs once I have verified the interactions and am testing alternate paths through my code. I use fake classes primarily to abstract out data dependencies or when mocks/stubs are too tedious to set up each time.

Answer 1

stub and fake are objects in that they can vary their response based on input parameters. the main difference between them is that a Fake is closer to a real-world implementation than a stub. Stubs contain basically hard-coded responses to an expected request. Let see an example:

public class MyUnitTest {

 @Test
 public void testConcatenate() {
  StubDependency stubDependency = new StubDependency();
  int result = stubDependency.toNumber("one", "two");
  assertEquals("onetwo", result);
 }
}

public class StubDependency() {
 public int toNumber(string param) {
  if (param == “one”) {
   return 1;
  }
  if (param == “two”) {
   return 2;
  }
 }
}

A mock is a step up from fakes and stubs. Mocks provide the same functionality as stubs but are more complex. They can have rules defined for them that dictate in what order methods on their API must be called. Most mocks can track how many times a method was called and can react based on that information. Mocks generally know the context of each call and can react differently in different situations. Because of this, mocks require some knowledge of the class they are mocking. a stub generally cannot track how many times a method was called or in what order a sequence of methods was called. A mock looks like:

public class MockADependency {

 private int ShouldCallTwice;
 private boolean ShouldCallAtEnd;
 private boolean ShouldCallFirst;

 public int StringToInteger(String s) {
  if (s == "abc") {
   return 1;
  }
  if (s == "xyz") {
   return 2;
  }
  return 0;
 }

 public void ShouldCallFirst() {
  if ((ShouldCallTwice > 0) || ShouldCallAtEnd)
   throw new AssertionException("ShouldCallFirst not first thod called");
  ShouldCallFirst = true;
 }

 public int ShouldCallTwice(string s) {
  if (!ShouldCallFirst)
   throw new AssertionException("ShouldCallTwice called before ShouldCallFirst");
  if (ShouldCallAtEnd)
   throw new AssertionException("ShouldCallTwice called after ShouldCallAtEnd");
  if (ShouldCallTwice >= 2)
   throw new AssertionException("ShouldCallTwice called more than twice");
  ShouldCallTwice++;
  return StringToInteger(s);
 }

 public void ShouldCallAtEnd() {
  if (!ShouldCallFirst)
   throw new AssertionException("ShouldCallAtEnd called before ShouldCallFirst");
  if (ShouldCallTwice != 2) throw new AssertionException("ShouldCallTwice not called twice");
  ShouldCallAtEnd = true;
 }

}

Answer 2

If you are familiar with Arrange-Act-Assert, then one way of explaining the difference between stub and mock that might be useful for you, is that stubs belong to the arrange section, as they are for arranging input state, and mocks belong to the assert section as they are for asserting results against.

Dummies don't do anything. They are just for filling up parameter lists, so that you don't get undefined or null errors. They also exist to satisfy the type checker in strictly typed languages, so that you can be allowed to compile and run.