subclass-and-override vs partial mocking vs refactoring

Attention all noble mockers and evil partial mockers. Actually… both styles are evil :) Spy, don’t mock… or better: do whatever you like just keep writing beautiful, clean and non-brittle tests.

Let’s get to the point: partial mocking smelled funny to me for a long time. I thought I didn’t need because frankly, I haven’t found a situation where I could use it.

Until few days ago when I found a place for it. Did I just come to terms with partial mocks? Maybe. Interestingly, partial mock scenario seems to be related with working with code that we don’t have full control of…

I’ve been hacking a new feature for mockito, an experiment which suppose to enhance the feedback from a failing test. On the way, I encountered a spot where partial mocking appeared handy. I decided to code the problem in few different ways and convince myself that partial mocking is a true blessing.

Here is an implementation of a JunitRunner. I trimmed it a little bit so that only interesting stuff stayed. The runner should print warnings only when the test fails. The super.run(notifier) is wrapped in a separate method so that I can replace this method from the test:

How would the test look like? I’m going to subclass-and-override to replace runTestBody() behavior. This will give me opportunity to test the run() method.

It’s ugly but shhh… let’s blame the jUnit API.

The runTestBody() method is quite naughty but I’ve got a powerful weapon at hand: partial mocking. What’s that? Typically mocking consist of using a replacement of the entire object. Partial stands for replacing only the part of real implementation, for example a single method.

Here is the test, using hypothetical Mockito partial mocking syntax. Actually, shouldn’t I call it partial stubbing?

Both tests are quite similar. I test MockitoJUnitRunner class by replacing the implementation of runTestBody(notifier). First example uses test specific implementation of the class under test. Second test uses a kind of partial mocking. This sort of comparison was very nicely done in this blog post by Phil Haack. I guess I came to the similar conclusion and I believe that:

• subclass-and-override is not worse than partial mocking
• subclass-and-override might give cleaner code just like in my example. It all depends on the case at hand, though. I’m sure there are scenarios where partial mocking looks & reads neater.

Hold on a sec! What about refactoring? Some say that instead of partial mocking we should design the code better. Let’s see.

The code might look like this. There is a specific interface JunitTestBody that I can inject from the test. And yes, I know I’m quite bad at naming types.

Now, I can inject a proper mock or an anonymous implementation of entire JunitTestBody interface. I’m not concerned about the injection style because I don’t feel it matters that much here. I’m passing JunitTestBody as an argument.

Let’s draw some conclusions. In this particular scenario choosing refactoring over partial mocking doesn’t really push me towards the better design. I don’t want to get into details but junit API constrains me a bit here so I cannot refactor that freely. Obviously, you can figure out a better refactoring – I’m just yet another java developer. On the other hand, the partial mocking scenario is a very rare finding for me. I believe there might be something wrong in my code if I had to partial mock too often. After all, look at the tests above – can you say they are beautiful? I can’t.

So,

• I cannot say subclass-and-override < partial mocking
• not always refactoring > subclass-and-override/partial mocking
• partial mocking might be helpful but I’d rather not overuse it.
• partial mocking scenario seems to lurk in situations where I cannot refactor that freely.

Eventually, I chose subclass-and-override for my implementation. It’s simple, reads nicer and feels less mocky & more natural.