[japherwocky]

I think what the author is getting at is testing a particular method on an object without having to mock up all the data required by the entire object. I guess?

Agreed that the whole article would be more useful without the sarcasm.

[viraptor]

So that's basically allowing operations on a half-broken object, just so that you can test it without creating all the dependencies?... I see how it might be useful, but I just can't agree with that.

The tests are not the goal - a working product is. That's just making a trade-off between less lines in a test -vs- code that doesn't explode mid-transaction when that null suddenly occurs in a real-world scenario. If I'm supposed to write my code properly, testies should not be too lazy while writing the tests.

[omouse]

It's no longer a unit-test once you're putting the object into the living system. It becomes a system test and then you might as well test the whole system instead of faking things with mockups.

[zenocon]

If you use Java, EasyMock makes this a non-issue.

I have found that with a test framework like EasyMock, you no longer have to jump through so many of these goofy tdd hoops. You can mock methods, return values, thrown exceptions, parameters to methods to another object inside a method, etc. It still doesn't warrant writing crap code using anti-patterns, but nevertheless, it makes life more bearable by putting the focus back on the logic at hand and less on trying to follow the tdd mantra of design.