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by Jay Fields.
Original Post: Ruby: Mocks and Stubs using Mocha
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I've previously written about using Mocks and Stubs convey intent. When I was using C#, I believed this was the best solution for creating robust tests. These days, all my code is written in Ruby. Making the switch to Ruby provided another example that reinforces an assertion I've heard before: Best Practices are so context dependent it's dangerous to use the term.
Here's the reason I no longer feel as I did when I created the above entry: I can't think of a reason I would ever want to use SomeObject.stubs(..) instead of SomeObject.expects(..). The closest I could come to a reason was that stubs will allow an arbitrary number of calls to the same method. However, I don't believe that's a good enough reason since I can also use SomeObject.expects(:a_method).at_least_once.
The problem with using SomeObject.stubs is that it's almost the same as using SomeObject.expects, except if it's no longer necessary it doesn't cause a test to fail. This can lead to tests that unnecessarily stub methods as the application's implementation changes. And, the more methods that require stubbing the less the test can concisely convey intent.
I'm not asserting that you should never use SomeObject.stubs, but I do believe it's smarter to favor SomeObject.expects if you are concerned with keeping your test suite well maintained.
Of course, none of this is related to creating actual stubs for your tests. I still believe it's wise to create stub object instances for classes that are required for a unit test, but are not the class under test. For example, if I were testing a mapper class, I would use a stub for the objecting being mapped.
test "an order's id is mapped to the request object" do request = OrderServiceMapper.create_request(stub(:id=>1, ...)) assert_equal 1, request.order_id end
I use a stub in the above example because I don't want to couple the test to the implementation of an order. I believe this creates a more robust, maintainable test
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