Mockito, testing, nulls and exceptions

[eyalroth]

@jducoeur

Personally, I think Mockito has no business being in a Scala codebase – it is too type-weak and null-happy.

Personally, I prefer Mockito over any other mocking framework – Scala or Java. It has its caveats, but I strongly believe in its core testing methodology (stub mocks → invoke tested unit → assert output), its API is relatively simple, and it has a lot of (useful) features.

@jducoeur

I have a vague ambition (and I’d encourage somebody else to pick up the ball and run with it before I get to it) to fork Scalamock to change one aspect: when you hit an undefined method, immediately throw an Exception, instead of silently injecting a null that will cause confusing errors later. While that wouldn’t be perfect, I suspect it would work better in practice…

In Mockito, you have several options to achieve that; explicitly using verifyNoMoreInteractions on every test case; defining a Strictness test rule; or even returning “smart nulls” instead of plain nulls. See this SO question for details.