Comment by imabotbeep2937

Anyone who is overly zealous about anything is always wrong in the end. Including testing.

"Why would people mock everything? Why not stand up a real test db and test on it?" Because the test zealous have explicitly declared that EACH test should be atomic. Yes you can find these people at major tech conferences. Each test should mock its own db, web service, etc. Every single time. And it should do that in no more than a few milliseconds, so that the entire project compiles in no more than 2mins, even for the largest and most complex corporate projects. And these tests should be fully end-to-end, even for complex microservices across complex networking architecture.

Some of you may be rolling on the floor laughing at how naive and time-consuming such a project would be.

We all agree such testing is a noble goal. But you need a team of absolute geniuses who do nothing but write "clever" code all day to get there in any sizeable project.

My organization won't hire or pay those people, no matter what they say about having 100% coverage. We just do the best we can, cheat, and lower the targets as necessary.