When using Mokito, what is the difference between the actual object and the mocked object?

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Your test doesn’t test any of your code. It tests that Mockito works fine.

When I introduce the concept of mocking, I take this example: suppose you build a detonator, and want to test it. You could of course use the detonator with a real bomb, and see if the whole block explodes when you use the detonator. But that isn’t very practical. BTW, maybe you don’t even have a bomb at your disposal. Maybe your colleague is still building it.

So you use a mock bomb. Note the important point: to test the detonator, you use a mock bomb. Not a mock detonator. What is mocked is the dependency of the class under test. Not the class under test itself.

What is a mock bomb? It’s just a fake bomb that doesn’t do anything. All it does is allowing to verify if has been asked to explode or not. So your code to test the detonator would be like this:

// create a mock bomb:
Bomb mockBomb = mock(Bomb.class);
// create a real detonator, but tie it to the mock bomb:
Detonator detonator = new Detonator(mockBomb);

// test the detonator. Since it's tied to a mock bomb, the block
// won't explode
detonator.pressTheRedButton();

// check it the mock bomb has been asked to explode, as it should 
// if the detonator works correctly
verify(mockBomb).explode();

Now if the test passes, you know that all the internal circuitry that is used in pressTheRedButton() works fine and eventually tells the bomb to explode. So you know that, when used with a real bomb, the real bomb will be asked to explode as well when pressing the red button.

Now let’s come back to the real world: you want to test a service, and this service uses a DAO that needs a database, populated with data, to run fine. To test your service, you can simply mock the DAO, and verify it works fine. The mock DAO can also be used as a stub, i.e. an object that returns what you tell it to return in the test, instead of actually querying the database. That’s what you’re doing in the code in your question: you’re telling the mock MyClass instance that, when add() is called with 2 and 2 as arguments, it should return 4.

This makes the test easier to setup, faster to run, and independant from the actual code of the DAO, which is not what you want to test in the unit test of the service.

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