10
Testing Side Effects Without the Side Effects
(lackofimagination.org)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Programming
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This only checks that functions are called in the right order. Not that the functions are doing the right thing or if the functions are called with the correct arguments. Quite pointless testing IMO.
For example, it won’t capture cases where
cmdChargeCreditCardreturns a payment ID that exists forcmdCompleteOrderto use.Set up an in-memory database, or test against a real database. You don’t test side effects by pretending that the side effects are correct.
You can still test the functions individually or run the entire flow against a test database, but without an effect system like this, it's very hard to test business logic in isolation.