Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
7-17-2019
Publication Title
Scala 2019 Tenth ACM SIGPLAN Scala Symposium
Publisher Name
ACM
Abstract
In testing stateful abstractions, it is often necessary to record interactions, such as method invocations, and express assertions over these interactions. Following the Test Spy design pattern, we can reify such interactions programmatically through additional mutable state. Alternatively, a mocking framework, such as Mockito, can automatically generate test spies that allow us to record the interactions and express our expectations in a declarative domain-specific language. According to our study of the test code for Scala’s Iterator trait, the latter approach can lead to a significant reduction of test code complexity in terms of metrics such as code size (in some cases over 70% smaller), cyclomatic complexity, and amount of additional mutable state required. In this tools paper, we argue that the resulting test code is not only more maintainable, readable, and intentional, but also a better stylistic match for the Scala community than manually implemented, explicitly stateful test spies.
Recommended Citation
Konstantin Läufer, John O’Sullivan, and George K. Thiruvathukal. 2019. Tests as Maintainable Assets Via Auto-generated Spies. In Proceedings of Tenth ACM SIGPLAN Scala Symposium, London, United Kingdom, July 17, 2019 (Scala ’19),6 pages, DOI: 10.1145/3337932.3338814
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery
Comments
Final published version in ACM Digital Library at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3337932.3338814.