Mockist TDD vs Classic TDD

If you want to practice TDD there are two main approaches to choose from: mockist TDD or classic TDD (Martin Fowler). In this post i would like to compare between the two.

First, I’ll describe the two approaches and later I will list the pros and cons of the mockist approach.

Mockist TDD

With this approach, you're working in a high granularity, meaning every class has its own test fixture. As a result, each test fixture should only test one CUT (Class Under Test) and none of the classes the CUT depends on, assuming they all have their own test fixtures.

Suppose we have a class A that uses class B. To achieve the high granularity we’ve talked about, TestFixtureA must use a Test Double of B, as shown in figure 1:

Figure 1

Of course our design must support dependency injection to achieve that and it means class A must work against an interface of B and it also requires a way to inject a concrete instance of B into class A (via constructor/setters/IoC etc.)

That’s why this approach is called Mockist TDD since it has an extensive use of Mocks (Test Doubles). It is also called Isolated Testing since each class is tested in an isolated way.

NOTE: we isolate class A from class B even if class B is a regular business class that has no interactions with any external resources such as DB\web service\files system etc.

Classic TDD

With this approach, you're working in a low granularity, meaning every graph of classes has its own test fixture. As a result, each test fixture covers a graph of classes implicitly by testing the graph's root.

Figure 2

Usually you don't test the inner classes of the graph explicitly since they are already tested implicitly by the tests of their root, thus, you avoid coverage duplications. This lets you keep the inner classes with an internal access modifier unless they are in use by other projects.

Pros & Cons

Let’s describe the pros and cons of the mockist approach.

Pros

1.       More TDD’ish – since all the classes the CUT depends on are mocked, you can start testing the CUT without implementing the classes it depends on. Think about the classic approach, when you come to test some CUT, you should first implement its dependencies, but before that you should first implement their dependencies and so forth.

2.       High granularity – this means:

a.       Smaller test fixtures – one per class, unlike one per graph of classes in the classic approach.

b.      Smaller test setups – take a look on TestFixtureA at figure 2: the Arrange phase (Arrange-Act-Assert) of tests like this is quite large since it has to setup a state for too many classes in the graph. This quite a crucial issue – the bigger the test, the bigger the risk of having bugs in the test itself.

c.       Frequent checkins/commits – think about it, with the classic approach, your tests won’t pass before all the classes the CUT depends on are implemented correctly, thus, the frequency of your checkins (commits) is reduced dramatically (you don't want to commit red tests).

3.       More alternatives to do DI – take a look at figure 3, suppose you need to inject different concretes of interface I into class C. With the mockist approach, which heavily relies on injections, the code that initializes class A also initializes class B and inject it to class A, and also initializes class C and inject it to class B. Therefore, it can easily inject a concrete class of interface I into class C. See figure 4 for example. On the other hand, with the classic approach, the code that initialize class A doesn’t have access to the inner classes of the graph (B, C and I) and therefore its only way to inject a concrete class of interface I into class C is by using some framework of IoC.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Cons

1.       Much more interfaces and injections – with the mockist approach, for almost every class, you have at least one interface. In addition, there is some kind of injections inflation.

2.       Weaker encapsulation – each class exposes its relations with the classes it depends on so that they can be injected into it and also to allow behavior verification, this partly weakens the encapsulation.

3.       High vulnerability to refactoring – with the mockist approach, every change in the interaction between two classes, requires changes in some tests, since tests usually aware of the interactions between classes (see behavior verification). With the classic approach, on the other hand, you usually do state verification and thus, the tests are not aware of the interaction between classes.

Conclusions:

I personally definitely prefer the mockist approach for one main reason – I cannot see how truly TDD is possible without it.