Mocking Dependencies in PHPUnit

Great talk -- worth the long drive in the snow and traffic. I like the practical advice. For example, don't waste time testing getters and setters. And draw clear lines where not to to test -- verify the sql string that gets created. I would have tried to mock the database and return mock values, which would be a time-consuming mess I think.

There aren't many recent books on the subject, so this talk fills a need. Maybe Matt should write a book?? Or maybe a lynda.com-like series of videos going in depth.

One problem I have with these mock objects is that I don't have a mental model of how they actually work. They're like magic/pychic php objects. I think this lack of understanding on my part is making it more difficult to get comfortable with them. I realize that this is not practical to cover in a 1.5 hour intro talk. But if Matt or someone could blog about it, that would be helpful. (I'm assuming I'm not the only person who thinks this way. I could be wrong.)

I'm curious about what Matt or anyone else thinks about the practicality of TDD: Write the test first, watch it fail, then write code until it passes. Is this actually doable? It would mean 100% code coverage, which contracts the concept of don't test the simple stuff. Is TDD actually a waste?

Matt did a great job talking about mocking from a high-level and provided some interesting examples for handling things like mocking PDO connections and statements. Great talk and a fun speaker with a lot of humor! My favorite was, "if you don't mock your dependencies, you're gonna have a bad time."