Auto-generated Spies Increase Test Maintainability

08/29/2018

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by   Konstantin Läufer, et al.

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We have inspected the test code for the scala.collection.Iterator trait for potential systematic maintainability enhancements. Test spies are stub objects for later verification of interactions with those objects in a testing scenario. According to our preliminary findings, using a mocking framework that supports the automatic generation of test spies, such as Mockito, can lead to a significant improvement of test code in terms of size (in some cases over 70 smaller), readability, and conveying intent by expressing expectations through a declarative domain-specific language. We argue that the resulting test code is not only more maintainable but also a better stylistic match for the Scala community than manually implemented, explicitly stateful test spies.