I use mocks and I’m happy with that

Both Kent Beck and Martin Fowler have said that they don’t use mock objects in their test-driven development. I do. I use them mostly for the sense described first in my BNR blog post on Mock Objects, namely to stand in for a thing that can receive messages I want to send, but that does not yet exist.

If you look at the code in Test-Driven iOS Development, you’ll find that it uses plenty of test doubles but none of them is a mock object. What has changed in my worldview to move from not-mocking to mocking in that time?

The key information that gave me the insight was this message, pardon the pun! from Alan Kay on object-oriented programming:

The big idea is “messaging” – that is what the kernal[sic] of Smalltalk/Squeak
is all about (and it’s something that was never quite completed in our
Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word – ma – for “that which
is in between” – perhaps the nearest English equivalent is “interstitial”.
The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its
modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and
behaviors should be.

What I’m really trying to do is to define the network of objects connected by message sending, but the tool I have makes me think about objects and what they’re doing. To me, mock objects are the ability to subvert the tool, and force it to let me focus on the ma.