Software Engineering

As mentioned in my last post, I am an ardent fan of the Mockito Framework. Originally developed as a fork of EasyMock, it equips developers with the tools to create mock objects using clean and expressive code. In this post, we will show how PowerMock can be used alongside Mockito (or EasyMock) to create mocks for classes that appear at first ‘unmockable’. Suppose we have the following class:

Well-established tools like Mockito and EasyMock offer a powerful range of features for defining and interacting with mock objects. I use both heavily in my unit tests, and would recommend them to anyone looking for a mocking framework. Sometimes, however, a real (i.e. non-proxied) collaborator is called for, or adding third-party libraries may not be an option. In most cases, a suitable object could be instantiated by calling the constructor and setting it as a dependency to the object under test. Suppose though that we have the following ‘Footballer’ class, and we want to write a test for the ‘getAvgGoalsPerGame()’ method: