Python-为什么我们应该使用模拟进行测试？

Question

I am very new to Python and I saw many projects on Github using Mock to do their test but I don't understand why.
When we use mock, we construct a Mock object with a specific return_value, I don't truely understand why we do this. I know sometimes it is difficult to build our needed resources but what is the point if we construct a object/function with a certain return value ?

Answer 1

Mock can help to write unit tests. In unit tests, you want to test a small portion of your implementation. For example, as small as one function or one class.

In a moderately large software, these small parts depend on each other. Or sometimes there are external dependencies. You open files, do syscalls, or get external data in some other way.

While writing a directed unit test for a small portion of your code, you do not want to spend time to set-up everything else around it. (The files, syscalls, external data). Mock comes to your help there. With mock, you can make the other dependencies of your code behave exactly as you like. This way you can focus on testing your intended implementation.

Coming to the mock with the return value: Say you want to test func_a . And func_a calls func_b . func_b does a lot of funky processing to calculate its return value. For example, talking to an external service, doing bunch of syscalls, or some other expensive operation. Since you are testing func_a , you only care about possible return values of func_b . (So that func_a can use them) In this scenario you would mock func_b and set the return values explicitly. This can really simplify your test complexity.