We’ve just had an impromptu developer meeting because a power cut disabled all of our computers.
We discussed Test-Driven Development (TDD). Rhys talked about how mocking with a framework like Mockito makes test driven development easier to achieve, because you can use the mocks to check the side-effects of your code. Inigo felt that needing to use mocks was often a sign that your code had overly complex dependencies, and that it was sometimes better to instead make methods and components “pure” – so they didn’t have side-effects. Nikolay mentioned having used a .NET mocking framework, that might have been Moq, for testing some C# code that had a dependency on the database. Charlie discussed the problems of using an in-memory database that had slightly different behaviour from your actual database.