I agree with edA-qa on this point. Creating multitudes of mocks just to keep unit tests 'pure' seems like a great deal of effort to create and maintain additional code, and the benefit of doing so seems unclear to me. As edA-qa said, the real code can usually do double-duty as a test object.
There are cases for using mocks, but my opinion is that they should be introduced when depending on the real application logic in a test causes a problem. That can be for performance reasons; possibly to reduce the amount of setup/configuration needed just to run unit tests; perhaps because the real code may not be available when tests run; often mocks are used because time affects the results of the real code - in fact I imagine that things like the current system time and calls to random are some of the most often mocked pieces of logic.
Note: For this comment, by 'mock' I mean any kind of stand-in used for a test that replaces the actual application code. That includes 'mocks', 'stubs', 'fakes'...
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I agree with edA-qa on this point. Creating multitudes of mocks just to keep unit tests 'pure' seems like a great deal of effort to create and maintain additional code, and the benefit of doing so seems unclear to me. As edA-qa said, the real code can usually do double-duty as a test object.
There are cases for using mocks, but my opinion is that they should be introduced when depending on the real application logic in a test causes a problem. That can be for performance reasons; possibly to reduce the amount of setup/configuration needed just to run unit tests; perhaps because the real code may not be available when tests run; often mocks are used because time affects the results of the real code - in fact I imagine that things like the current system time and calls to random are some of the most often mocked pieces of logic.
Note: For this comment, by 'mock' I mean any kind of stand-in used for a test that replaces the actual application code. That includes 'mocks', 'stubs', 'fakes'...