Java Testing with Spock

8.3. Creating partial mocks with spies

In this section you’ll see how to create partial mocks.^[8] Chapter 6 explained how Spock can create fake objects that are useful for testing and showed you mocks and stubs. Spock supports a third type of “fake” object: spies.

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And why you shouldn’t use them!

Spies, shown in figure 8.5, work as partial mocks. They take over a Java object and mock only some of its methods. Method calls can either by stubbed (like mocks) or can pass through to the real object.

Figure 8.5. A spy is a real class in which only a subset of methods are fake. The rest are the real methods.

I purposely didn’t show you spies in ...