Dependency Inversion, and how to get it wrong

I’ve been building a new application in Clojure over the last week or so, and it seems to be going quite well. I like the syntax, using a functional language has been great, and it’s got enough gold in it that I can ignore the small pockets of “wat”.

I started with clojure.test, the test framework packaged with Clojure itself, but quickly decided I didn’t like the style, or the lack of more advanced testing functionality such as matchers and test doubles (i.e. stubs, mocks, etc.). So I turned to Midje, which comes highly recommended by my friend Alex Baranosky (who’s committed more code to the project than anyone aside from the original author, Brian Marick). Midje, aside from having a lovely syntax for writing tests (or “facts”, as it calls them), has equivalents to matchers (“checkers”) and test doubles (“prerequisites”) which make top-down development manageable.

There’s only one issue I have with the way that prerequisites work in Midje: they re-wire the function you’re testing so that when it calls the stub, it gets rerouted to another function. This means you can also stub a real function in order to replace behaviour for testing purposes.

People are divided on whether you should do this. In the Java world, you have PowerMock, which can replace bytecode in order to mock out static methods and all sorts of other fixed behaviour. On the opposing side, jMock doesn’t even let you stub or mock methods declared on classes by default, limiting you to mocking interfaces unless you give it a special override.

My opinion is that the authors of jMock (Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman) knew what they were doing. They hint at it with their JAR names—the override for mocking classes is in a JAR named jmock-legacy-[version].jar, implying that you should only use this when testing legacy code.

That’s not because they don’t want you to test legacy code. It’s because mocking classes produces legacy code.

So here’s a test, using Midje:

(fact "you can send a direct message to people who can follow you"
  (autocomplete "D b") => ["Bob", "b3t4t3st3r"]
  (provided (twitter/followers) =>
    ["Alice", "Bob", "b3t4t3st3r", "Carol", "chuck"]))

What’s wrong with this test? I’ve coupled the behaviour of autocomplete to the twitter/followers function, and then overridden the behaviour in the test. This has produced coupling between my function and Twitter itself, which means my code will be inflexible and hard to change later. The reason Nat and Steve made it difficult to mock out classes is because they didn’t want you to couple the implementation of collaborators—instead, you should be mocking at the interface level. Testing collaboration between concrete classes should be hard—as Steve has so often said, your tests are telling you something. Listen to them. Fix your code.

In this case, we can fix it by constructing our autocomplete function with a reference to twitter/followers, and then passing in a stub in the test. By doing this, we decouple autocomplete from the Twitter API and allow it to do just one thing.

(unfinished followers)
(def autocomplete (new-autocomplete followers))

(fact "you can send a direct message to people who can follow you"
  (autocomplete "D b") => ["Bob", "b3t4t3st3r"]
  (provided (followers) =>
    ["Alice", "Bob", "b3t4t3st3r", "Carol", "chuck"]))

Note: unfinished is a Midje function that creates a mock function.

Same behaviour, roughly the same test, and the only thing to change in the implementation is an extra parameter. This was even easier to do than it is in Java or C#! So what does it give us?

By replacing some code that overrides behaviour with code that injects the dependency, we reduce our system’s reliance on one specific source of information and make it far more flexible. Now, if I decide I want to work with Facebook, I can add that functionality without touching the autocomplete function itself. How cool is that?

Stubbing is a powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility. Use it wisely. When it becomes difficult to change a test or write a new one, or when you have to change a hundred tests to make a one-line change to some behaviour, ask yourself: what are my tests telling me about the quality of my code?