this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2025
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The issue with my org is the push to be ci/cd means 90% line and branch coverage, which ends up being you spend just as much time writing tests as actually developing the feature, which already is on an accelerated schedule because my org has made promises that end up becoming ridiculous deadlines, like a 2 month project becoming a 1 month deadline
Mocking is easy, almost everything in my team's codebase is designed to be mockable. The only stuff I can think of that isn't mocked are usually just clocks, which you could mock but I actually like using fixed clocks for unit testing most of the time. But mocking is also tedious. Lots of mocks end up being:
Chances are, if you wrote it you should already know what branches are there. It's just translating that to actual unit tests that's a pain. Branching logic should be easy to read as well. If I read a nested if statement chances are there's something that can be redesigned better.
I also think that 90% of actual testing should be done through integ tests. Unit tests to me helps to validate what you expect to happen, but expectations don't necessarily equate to real dependencies and inputs. But that's a preference, mostly because our design philosophy revolves around dependency injection.
I think both are essential, and they test different things. Unit tests verify that individual pieces do what you expect, whereas integration tests verify that those pieces are connected properly. Unit tests should be written by the devs and help them prove their solution works as intended, and integration tests should be written by QA to prove that user flows work as expected.
Integration test coverage should be measured in terms of features/capabilities, whereas unit tests are measured in terms of branches and lines. My target is 90% for features/capabilities (mostly miss the admin bits that end customers don't use), and 70-80% for branches and lines (skip unlikely errors, simple data passing code like controllers, etc). Getting the last bit of testing for each is nice, but incredibly difficult and low value.
I use Python, which allows runtime mocking of existing objects, so most of our mocks are like this:
Most tests have one or two lines of this above the test function. It's pretty simple and not very repetitive at all. If we need more complex mocks, that's usually a sign we need to refactor the code.
I absolutely hate dependency injection, most of the time. 99% of the time, there are only two implementations of a dependency, the standard one and a mock.
If there's a way to patch things at runtime (e.g. Python's unittest.mock lib), dependency injection becomes a massive waste of time with all the boilerplate.
If there isn't a way to patch things at runtime, I prefer a more functional approach that works off interfaces where dependencies are merely passed as needed as data. That way you avoid the boilerplate and still get the benefits of DI.
That said, dependency injection has its place if a dependency has several implementations. I find that's pretty rare, but maybe its more common in your domain.