Question

My development team has started to use Mockito and have classes that have been defined as ‘final’. I’ve read in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch and in the SO thread When to use final that all classes should use the final modifier. There have been some disagreement in the thread, but I do agree with the idea of forcing class composition unless inheritance makes sense.

What should I do when I want to test classes using a testing framework like Mockito that requires classes to not have the ‘final’ modifier? I’m hoping someone else has encountered similar issues during their development. What resolutions did your development team arrive on?

There are two obvious answers such as using JMock or remove the ‘final’ modifier on the classes we want to test, but we want to stick with one external testing framework (besides JUnit) and it may be hard to convince other developers to remove the ‘final’ modifier.

Thanks.

Answer 1

What do you need most:

1. The ability to make sure that somebody doesn’t inherit from your class, OR
2. The ability to make sure that your code is testable using your mocking framework of choice?

Generally, I believe that you don’t need to enforce (1). For me, testability (2), is far more important. What fits your situation best?