Increase Your JavaScript Productivity With Stubs, Improving Tests In The Process - Toggl Blog

It’s very common to have to write applications or libraries with dependencies that are completely foreign to your code. Regardless of whether it’s a database server, a web-service, some CLI-tools or even timers, suddendly your tests spend several seconds waiting for responses and/or don’t have strictly defined behavior. It’d be great if we could define foreign behavior programatically. Instead of actually interacting with them, we could just test our interactions. The solution for this problem exists and is very simple: using stubs. Knowing how to use them will make your tests easier to write, predictable and a whole lot faster. In this post, I’ll explain what are stubs through examples, a simple implementation of a stub, sinon.js usage with mocha and my project mocha-make-stub.