testing - What is a mock and when should you use it?

Question

I just read the Wikipedia article on mock objects, but I'm still not entirely clear on their purpose. It appears they are objects that are created by a test framework when the actual object would be too complex or unpredictable (you know 100% sure what the values of the mock object are because you fully control them).

However, I was under the impression that all testing is done with objects of known values, so I must be missing something. For example, in a course project, we were tasked with a calendar application. Our test suite consisted of event objects that we knew exactly what they were so we could test the interactions between multiple event objects, various subsystems, and the user interface. I'm guessing these are mock objects, but I don't know why you wouldn't do this because without the objects of known values, you can't test a system.

Answer 1

A mock object is not just an object with known values. It is an object that has the same interface as a complex object that you cannot use in test (like a database connection and result sets), but with an implementation that you can control in your test.

There are mocking frameworks that allow you to create these objects on the fly and in essence allow you to say something like: Make me an object with a method foo that takes an int and returns a bool. When I pass 0, it should return true. Then you can test the code that uses foo(), to make sure it reacts appropriately.

Martin Fowler has a great article on mocking:

• http://martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html