Assessing Mock Classes: An Empirical Study Gustavo Pereira, Andre Hora ASERG Group, Department of Computer Science (DCC) Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) Belo Horizonte, Brazil fghapereira,
[email protected] Abstract—During testing activities, developers frequently SinonJS1 and Jest,2 which is supported by Facebook; Java rely on dependencies (e.g., web services, etc) that make the developers can rely on Mockito3 while Python provides test harder to be implemented. In this scenario, they can use unittest.mock4 in its core library. The other solution to create mock objects to emulate the dependencies’ behavior, which contributes to make the test fast and isolated. In practice, mock classes is by hand, that is, manually creating emulated the emulated dependency can be dynamically created with the dependencies so they can be used in test cases. In this case, support of mocking frameworks or manually hand-coded in developers do not need to rely on any particular mocking mock classes. While the former is well-explored by the research framework since they can directly consume the mock class. literature, the latter has not yet been studied. Assessing mock For example, to facilitate web testing, the Spring web classes would provide the basis to better understand how those mocks are created and consumed by developers and to detect framework includes a number of classes dedicated to mock- 5 novel practices and challenges. In this paper, we provide the ing. Similarly, the Apache Camel integration framework first empirical study to assess mock classes. We analyze 12 provides mocking classes to support distributed and asyn- popular software projects, detect 604 mock classes, and assess chronous testing.6 That is, in those cases, instead of using their content, design, and usage.