Mocks Are Your Friends, Not Your Servants

I need to restart my work on DoubleAgent. I was discouraged by all the mock libraries that came out and I never had time to come back and finish it, but maybe this will give me the kick in the pants to do it.

I generally agree with all of the things you said here. My only addition to the conversation is to not call it a mock anymore since there’s too much baggage around it or people misunderstand it.

I like the framing of it as something that collaboratively works with you to validate the contract from the inside.

I have thought similarly for a long time and that was part of why after using double and working with its creator/mantainer in the past I thought a better name would be double agent, because it’s running in the implementation but it’s working for you.

I also have a whole lot of plans for how it can be iteratively employed and guide you from a very simple non-ideal approach to a fully speced out behaviour where all of the best features come about and become easy from following the best practices.

It’s a great article. Thank you for writing it

Just shared this with colleagues. Loved this article.