HTTP Testing to the edge on iOS: The School of Hard Mocks

I’m a big fan of Automated Testing, even on iOS projects, but even when I was doing mostly Ruby, Java and C# work, I was never a big user of mock objects.

Now, I’ll admit that Mock objects can be useful under some circumstances, but I’ve seen them used too often in cases where a bunch of different developers each build their own little fiefdoms of their own code surrounded by Mock Objects where they interact with anything else. Each developer’s code runs perfectly when being tested against Mock input, but when you put all that code together, you can’t get a transaction working end-to-end, because the real world doesn’t obey the assumptions inherent in the Mocks.

Published at October 30, 2011 ·  3 min read

NSInMemoryStoreType is not a good substitute in unit tests

So I was writing some tests for my KidChart app, which uses core data, and I wasted a ton of time, so I thought I’d post to warn people.  I wanted to avoid having to reset the state for each test, and I wanted the tests to run quickly, so I used NSInMemoryStoreType for my persistent store in my unit tests. This is a technique I’ve used before in other programming languages, and I was new to Core Data, so I was applying what I had done before to something I had insufficiently researched.

Published at August 29, 2010 ·  3 min read