Unit Testing Singletons

Much have been said about the singleton pattern, a short visit to Google shows that its mainly about why not to use them. However, for some reason, in all projects I have seen up to date I found quite a few usages of this patten. In fact in most places, this pattern is over used extensible. I'm guessing this is mainly due to the ease of implementation, and the fact that in most systems one can find several classes which are only instantiated once. (i.e. we only need a single instance in the system) This post is NOT about whether singleton are good or bad, for me that's not an interesting question. In realizing that most people use them, my goal in this post is just to show some useful tips on how to actually handle them during tests . But first lets look at a common implementation of the...

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Posted in: Isolator,TDD,tips,Unit Tests

Is Typemock Isolator Evil - Round N+1

Every few months the argument for and against the advance abilities of the Isolator mocking framework burst again. This time it started with this post: Test driven design – Willed vs. Forced Designs Disclaimer: I used to work for Typemock company and was in charge for a long time over the development of the framework. so I claim no kind of objectivity . the argument for and against usually circle around the following: on one side, people claim that Isolator "breaks" the language barriers and, by allowing any kind of design to be implemented will end up in helping to build a poorly designed system. on the other side, by allowing the freedom to design at will Isolator shift the responsibility back to the developer allowing him to choose the "best" design as he sees fit. here are some...

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Posted in: Design,Engineering Practices,Scrum. Random Thoughts,tools,Typemock