SEsearls·Nov 15, 2016
As a person who co-owns a company named Test Double, you'll never guess, dear reader, where I come down on this issue.
Here is a GitHub wiki where I break them down a decent amount: https://github.com/testdouble/contributing-tests/wiki/Test-D...
I've also written a JavaScript library called testdouble.js that has pretty detailed docs on their background purpose: https://github.com/testdouble/testdouble.js/blob/master/docs...
For what it's worth, Gerard Meszaros coined the term "test double" in his fantastic book (which most of you have never heard of, much less read) called xUnit Patterns. This is relevant to Gary's point, because like most things that require expertise specific terms only become useful as you grow close to the work. Most people don't use test doubles to facilitate isolated test-driven development, so most people won't co
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me across the terms (or their sources).
I can't claim to be an expert in much, but—for reasons that evade my understanding—I do claim to be one in test double science™. What I can say is it can be tiresome when an expert has to constantly engage with relative novices who lack a curiosity with really engaging on the topic. Over the years, I've grown comfortable with the fact that most people—by which I mean, almost _all_ people—who want to talk about test doubles actually just want to fake something out in a test that's causing them pain. This is a perfectly fine thing to want to do, but it's orthogonal to why nuanced test double types & subtypes and jargon was ever necessary, which is mostly steeped in very rigorous schools of test-driven development.
There's no wrong way to do it. If you only write relatively "integrated" tests, nomenclature like "mock that out" won't cause you much harm but for the occasional eyeroll from people like me. But if you're interested in using tests as a sounding board to improve the design of your systems, they're one toolset for one style of approach (of many) that can help you in that endeavor—and which require the kind of specificity that Gary described above.