Mock Object - Limitations

Limitations

The use of mock objects can closely couple the unit tests to the actual implementation of the code that is being tested. For example, many mock object frameworks allow the developer to check the order of and number of times that mock object methods were invoked by the real object being tested; subsequent refactoring of the code that is being tested could therefore cause the test to fail even though all mocked object methods still obey the contract of the previous implementation. This illustrates that unit tests should test a method's external behavior rather than its internal implementation. Over-use of mock objects as part of a suite of unit tests can result in a dramatic increase in the amount of maintenance that needs to be performed on the tests themselves during system evolution as refactoring takes place. The improper maintenance of such tests during evolution could allow bugs to be missed that would otherwise be caught by unit tests that use instances of real classes. Conversely, simply mocking one method might require far less configuration than setting up an entire real class and therefore reduce maintenance needs.

Mock objects have to accurately model the behavior of the object they are mocking, which can be difficult to achieve if the object being mocked comes from another developer or project or if it has not even been written yet. If the behavior is not modeled correctly then the unit tests may register a pass even though a failure would occur at run time under the same conditions that the unit test is exercising, thus rendering the unit test inaccurate.