Towards a Testing Vocabulary

I know I’m probably late to the game, but I just found a great breakdown of kinds of test doubles.

There are a lot of terms floating around when it comes to automated testing:

• Mock Objects
• Fakes
  
• Dummies
  
• etc
  

This isn’t a big deal when you first write tests. As your testing becomes more advanced, things get complicated. Eventually confusion sets in when someone goes to use your mock object and you have to tell them it only works for a specific test, or vice versa.

Martin Fowler mentions testing vocabulary in one of his essays, and refers to terminology from Gerard Meszaros. I did a little digging, and found that Gerard authored (among other things) a neat chart on the aforementioned page that shows how different kinds of test doubles compare in their behavior, along with some examples.