I really like test driven development. It lets me be lazy. I don’t have to worry about my software quality, or that something I did broke some other thing. And with good dependency injection to make sure every component is working right, “it just works.” Now I code using TDD (writing my tests first, then coding to fulfill them), and I focus our QA efforts on making sure we have great test plans, and great coverage.

So, when one of my project teams kept telling me they couldn’t write tests because the database wasn’t ready I got worried. Our team had been immersed in TDD for months — and every single engineer had nodded vigorously when I set expectations. The team leader recited the definition of “dependency injection,” just to drive home how ready they were to embrace it!

But when I asked to see the what was wrong, I knew we had a problem. The team’s tests were not injecting mock objects the right way. The idea behind dependency injection is to replace the smallest component possible in a closed system with another object, a “mock.” That mock can then monitor the system around it, inject different behaviors, and create desired results.

For example, let’s say we have a program that connects to a gizmo — your home thermostat. The thermostat itself is a separate component that lives outside your program. We can expect the thermostat to behave like a thermostat should… reporting the current temperature, and letting the home owner enter a desired room temperature. Pretty straight forward.

So the first step is to write a program that talks to the thermostat. We can wire up a real thermostat, but we’ve got a problem right off the bat. We want to know how our program behaves as the ambient temperature changes — 65 degrees, 32 degrees, or 100 degrees. But a real thermostat is only going to report the actual room temperature, and making the room frigid or boiling just isn’t going to be very comfortable or practical.

This is where dependency injection comes in — wouldn’t it be great if we could inject a new gizmo, one that behaves according to our test plan?

It turns out that my team had been taking the wrong approach — but one that is pretty easy to make if you’re new to the idea of mocking and dependency injection. Unfortunately, it meant that they weren’t really testing the application. The were testing something else entirely.

Once we walked through the system, the mistake was clear. During application start up, it created a connection to a database. My team’s approach had been to add a “mocking” variable to the application. In effect, it created a test condition; if the application was in “mocking mode” it would only simulate database calls. If the application was not in “mocking mode” it sent real requests to a real database. Sounds great, right?

But it’s all wrong. Here’s the problem: The application was faking real world behavior. That is, throughout the program there were dozens of little tests, in effect asking, “if we are mocking, then don’t check the database for a user record, instead just return this fake user record.”

This meant that the real program — the actual application logic that would be deployed to the real world — was never tested. Instead, an alternate branch of logic was tested — a fake program, if you will. So two things happened:

1. We weren’t testing the real program, we were testing something else altogether.
2. The program itself became terribly complicated because of all the checks to find out “are we mocking?” and the subsequent code to do something else entirely.

And all of that is why my team said they couldn’t really test the system, because the database wasn’t up and running.

So what does real dependency injection look like? It’s simple: You want to change the actual gizmo, but change it in the most subtle way possible — and then you want to put that actual gizmo right back into your program.

Getting back to the thermostat example, an ideal solution would be to modify a real thermostat. You could crack it open, remove the temperature sensor, and add a little dial to it that lets you change the reported temperature. Then you plug the “mock thermostat” into your program, and you change the temperature manually! A potentially better approach would be to change the software that talks to your thermostat, and instrument it so that you can override the actual reported temperature. Your program would still think it’s talking to a real thermostat, and the connecting software could change the actual temperature before handing it off to your program.

In our case, the right solution could be injecting a simple mock component at the just the right point in our program.

For example, lets say our application uses an Authenticator object to log in users. The Authenticator checks the validity of a user in the database, and then returns a properly constructed User object. We can use dependency injection to substitute our own test data by overriding the single function we care about:

object fakeAuthenticator extends Authenticator {
    override def getUser(id: Int): Option[User] = {
        Some(User(id: -1, name: "Fake User"))
    }
}

On line 2, we replace the real Authenticator’s getUser function. The overridden method returns a hard-wired User object (in this case, one that clearly doesn’t represent a valid user account). By overriding the Authenticator in the test package only, the original program is not altered — all that’s left is to inject our altered Authenticator into the program.

The old fashioned way of doing injection is still reliable: Don’t tell, ask. Use a factory object to ask for the Authenticator. Given a factory in the application (let’s call it the AuthenticatorFactory) we can override what the factory actually returns in our test case only:

AuthenticatorFactory.setAuthenticatorInstance(fakeAuthenticator)

A slightly more modern approach is to use a dependency injection framework, but the underlying principle is exactly the same.

Likewise we can take the concept of mock objects further by using frameworks such as Mockito (a framework that works wonderfully with specs2). Mockito makes it easy to instrument real objects with test driven behavior. For example, Mockito will produce a mock object that acts just like a real object, but fulfills expectations (such as testing to make sure that a specific function is called a certain number of times).

Whatever tools and frameworks you use, test driven development has proven itself over the past decade. My own experience is the same: Every TDD project has produced more predictable results, has better velocity, and has been more reliable overall. It’s why I don’t do any coding without following TDD.