I worked at one place that had so many mocks, your tests were barely testing any real code. In one case, a dude checked in a 5000 line test suite for an "internal API." The server was mocked. All the tests were doing was checking that calls echoed back their own parameters. What was the point? Well, the API client now had 100% coverage.
Going into new segments of our code, I’ve had to rewrite an awful lot of tests. It was a mess, and each one had at least a few tests that were only testing the mocks. Hand written mocks at that. Those people need to be stopped.
It wasn't that bad at a previous job, but it was close. The sad part is nobody else would comment on the useless nature of these tests that didn't actually test anything.
It’s very tricky to be against any kind of testing in a professional setting… opens you up for other engineers to question your maturity, professionalism, an and commitment to reliability. Or at least to look substantially more mature, professional, and committed to reliability than you. In front of management that can be death.
People with a lot of clout have absorbed the virtues of automated testing in general and applied it to unit testing in particular. It’s hard to swim upstream on that one.
It's true. I mean, I wouldn't comment on them either. I'd just roll my eyes when asked to review another 4000 line "test suite" that upped the coverage but did not test anything meaningful. I wrote many useless tests myself, assigned tasks like "upping test coverage for module XYZ." They'd all get thumbs up and looks-good in reviews.
