Programming Kotlin

Mocking Out Dependencies

Dependencies often make testing hard. Our code needs to get the status of airports from a remote web service. The response from the service will be different at different times due to the nature of the data. The web service may fail intermittently, the program may run into a network failure, and so on. All these situations make it hard to write unit tests, which should be FAIR, for a piece of code that has to talk to such non-deterministic, and by their nature, unreliable external dependencies. This is where mocks come in.

A mock is an object that stands in for the real object, much like how a stunt person, instead of your favorite high-paid actor, stands in or jumps off a cliff in an action thriller. During normal ...