Practical Mock Advice is practical:
Coordinator objects like controllers are driven into existence because you need to hook two areas of your application together. In Rails applications, you usually drive the controller into existence using a Cucumber scenario or some other integration test. Most of the time controllers are straightforward and not very interesting: essentially a bunch of boilerplate code to wire your app together. In these cases the benefit of having isolated controller tests is very little, but the cost of creating and maintaining them can be high.Includes the standard description of how to use mocks with external services. But more interesting are his ideas and conclusions on when to mock, how to mock caching implementations, and how to mock controllers/presenters/coordinator objects.A general rule of thumb is this: If there are interesting characteristics or behaviors associated with a coordinator object and it is not well covered by another test, by all means add an isolated test around it and know that mocks can be very effective.
