nathanblack.org

Refining Modern Web Development

bdd

01/30/2017

Don't Mock Your Code - The Behavior is the Unit

I first started really utilizing unit testing and test-driven development while on the DataMarket team at Microsoft was slowing migrating an ASP.NET WebForms app to MVC. In a team that had no tests maintained by developers (shudder how did we develop software this long?) it was a big cultural change led by my great colleages Jon Sequiera and Dmitry Frenkel, who I am very greatful to have the experience of working with.

At the time we'd write tests for our controllers. We'd mock out all the dependencies it would need in a test and provide them. We were also using the repository pattern and testing the controller we'd mock that out. The repository pattern was really needed as we couldn't actually make a call to the database due to a lot of different reasons that basically stem from a monolithic ball of sphagetti code and abomination that was Entity Framework 1.0.

That was nice to get developers used to writing tests for their code, but there was a lot of problems with that. Views were not tested at all,