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An example of avoiding Mocks and Stubs in C# unit testing.

This article is an instalment in an article series about how to move from interaction-based testing to state-based testing. In the previous article, you saw an example of a pragmatic state-based test in F#. You can now take your new-found knowledge and apply it to the original C# example.

In the spirit of xUnit Test Patterns, in this article you'll see how to refactor the tests while keeping the implementation code constant.

The code shown in this article is available on GitHub.

Connect two users #

The previous article provides more details on the System Under Test (SUT), but here it is, repeated, for your convenience:

public class ConnectionsController : ApiController
{
    public ConnectionsController(
        IUserReader userReader,
        IUserRepository userRepository)
    {
        UserReader = userReader;
        UserRepository = userRepository;
    }
 
    public IUserReader UserReader { get; }
    public IUserRepository UserRepository { get; }
 
    public IHttpActionResult Post(string userId, string otherUserId)
    {
        var userRes = UserReader.Lookup(userId).SelectError(
            error => error.Accept(UserLookupError.Switch(
                onInvalidId: "Invalid user ID.",
                onNotFound:  "User not found.")));
        var otherUserRes = UserReader.Lookup(otherUserId).SelectError(
            error => error.Accept(UserLookupError.Switch(
                onInvalidId: "Invalid ID for other user.",
                onNotFound:  "Other user not found.")));
 
        var connect =
            from user in userRes
            from otherUser in otherUserRes
            select Connect(user, otherUser);
 
        return connect.SelectBoth(Ok, BadRequest).Bifold();
    }
 
    private User Connect(User user, User otherUser)
    {
        user.Connect(otherUser);
        UserRepository.Update(user);
 
        return otherUser;
    }
}

This implementation code is a simplification of the code example that serves as an example running through my two Clean Coders videos, Church Visitor and Preserved in translation.

A Fake database #

As in the previous article, you can define a test-specific Fake database:

public class FakeDB : Collection<User>, IUserReader, IUserRepository
{
    public IResult<User, IUserLookupError> Lookup(string id)
    {
        if (!(int.TryParse(id, out int i)))
            return Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(UserLookupError.InvalidId);
 
        var user = this.FirstOrDefault(u => u.Id == i);
        if (user == null)
            return Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(UserLookupError.NotFound);
 
        return Result.Success<User, IUserLookupError>(user);
    }
 
    public bool IsDirty { get; set; }
 
    public void Update(User user)
    {
        IsDirty = true;
        if (!Contains(user))
            Add(user);
    }
}

This is one of the few cases where I find inheritance more convenient than composition. By deriving from Collection<User>, you don't have to explicitly write code to expose a Retrieval Interface. The entirety of a standard collection API is already available via the base class. Had this class been part of a public API, I'd be concerned that inheritance could introduce future breaking changes, but as part of a suite of unit tests, I hope that I've made the right decision.

Although you can derive a Fake database from a base class, you can still implement required interfaces - in this case IUserReader and IUserRepository. The Update method is the easiest one to implement, since it simply sets the IsDirty flag to true and adds the user if it's not already part of the collection.

The IsDirty flag is the only custom Retrieval Interface added to the FakeDB class. As the previous article explains, this flag provides a convenient was to verify whether or not the database has changed.

The Lookup method is a bit more involved, since it has to support all three outcomes implied by the protocol:

• If the id is invalid, a result to that effect is returned.
• If the user isn't found, a result to that effect is returned.
• If the user with the requested id is found, then that user is returned.

Happy path test case #

This is all you need in terms of Test Doubles. You now have a test-specific IUserReader and IUserRepository implementation that you can pass to the Post method. Notice that a single class implements multiple interfaces. This is often key to be able to implement a Fake object in the first place.

Like in the previous article, you can start by exercising the happy path where a user successfully connects with another user:

[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersSuccessfullyConnect(
    [Frozen(Matching.ImplementedInterfaces)]FakeDB db,
    User user,
    User otherUser,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    db.Add(user);
    db.Add(otherUser);
    db.IsDirty = false;
 
    var actual = sut.Post(user.Id.ToString(), otherUser.Id.ToString());
 
    var ok = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<OkNegotiatedContentResult<User>>(actual);
    Assert.Equal(otherUser, ok.Content);
    Assert.True(db.IsDirty);
    Assert.Contains(otherUser.Id, user.Connections);
}

This, and all other tests in this article use xUnit.net 2.3.1 and AutoFixture 4.1.0.

The test is organised according to my standard heuristic for formatting tests according to the Arrange Act Assert pattern. In the Arrange phase, it adds the two valid User objects to the Fake db and sets the IsDirty flag to false.

Setting the flag is necessary because this is object-oriented code, where objects have mutable state. In the previous articles with examples in F# and Haskell, the User types were immutable. Connecting two users didn't mutate one of the users, but rather returned a new User value, as this F# example demonstrates:

// User -> User -> User
let addConnection user otherUser =
    { user with ConnectedUsers = otherUser :: user.ConnectedUsers }

In the current object-oriented code base, however, connecting one user to another is an instance method on the User class that mutates its state:

public void Connect(User otherUser)
{
    connections.Add(otherUser.Id);
}

As a consequence, the Post method could, if someone made a mistake in its implementation, call user.Connect, but forget to invoke UserRepository.Update. Even if that happened, then all the other assertions would pass. This is the reason that you need the Assert.True(db.IsDirty) assertion in the Assert phase of the test.

While we can apply to object-oriented code what we've learned from functional programming, the latter remains simpler.

Error test cases #

While there's one happy path, there's four distinct error paths that you ought to cover. You can use the Fake database for that as well:

[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersFailToConnectWhenUserIdIsInvalid(
    [Frozen(Matching.ImplementedInterfaces)]FakeDB db,
    string userId,
    User otherUser,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    Assert.False(int.TryParse(userId, out var _));
    db.Add(otherUser);
    db.IsDirty = false;
 
    var actual = sut.Post(userId, otherUser.Id.ToString());
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("Invalid user ID.", err.Message);
    Assert.False(db.IsDirty);
}
 
[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersFailToConnectWhenOtherUserIdIsInvalid(
    [Frozen(Matching.ImplementedInterfaces)]FakeDB db,
    User user,
    string otherUserId,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    Assert.False(int.TryParse(otherUserId, out var _));
    db.Add(user);
    db.IsDirty = false;
 
    var actual = sut.Post(user.Id.ToString(), otherUserId);
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("Invalid ID for other user.", err.Message);
    Assert.False(db.IsDirty);
}
 
[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersDoNotConnectWhenUserDoesNotExist(
    [Frozen(Matching.ImplementedInterfaces)]FakeDB db,
    int userId,
    User otherUser,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    db.Add(otherUser);
    db.IsDirty = false;
 
    var actual = sut.Post(userId.ToString(), otherUser.Id.ToString());
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("User not found.", err.Message);
    Assert.False(db.IsDirty);
}
 
[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersDoNotConnectWhenOtherUserDoesNotExist(
    [Frozen(Matching.ImplementedInterfaces)]FakeDB db,
    User user,
    int otherUserId,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    db.Add(user);
    db.IsDirty = false;
 
    var actual = sut.Post(user.Id.ToString(), otherUserId.ToString());
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("Other user not found.", err.Message);
    Assert.False(db.IsDirty);
}

There's little to say about these tests that hasn't already been said in at least one of the previous articles. All tests inspect the state of the Fake database after calling the Post method. The exact interactions between Post and db aren't specified. Instead, these tests rely on setting up the initial state, exercising the SUT, and verifying the final state. These are all state-based tests that avoid over-specifying the interactions.

Specifically, none of these tests use Mocks and Stubs. In fact, at this incarnation of the test code, I was able to entirely remove the reference to Moq.

Summary #

The premise of Refactoring is that in order to be able to refactor, the "precondition is [...] solid tests". In reality, many development organisations have the opposite experience. When programmers attempt to make changes to how their code is organised, tests break. In xUnit Test Patterns this problem is called Fragile Tests, and the cause is often Overspecified Software. This means that tests are tightly coupled to implementation details of the SUT.

It's easy to inadvertently fall into this trap when you use Mocks and Stubs, even when you follow the rule of using Mocks for Commands and Stubs for Queries. Refactoring tests towards state-based testing with Fake objects, instead of interaction-based testing, could make test suites more robust to changes.

It's intriguing, though, that state-based testing is simpler in functional programming. In Haskell, you can simply write your tests in the State monad and compare the expected outcome to the actual outcome. Since state in Haskell is immutable, it's trivial to compare the expected with the actual state.

As soon as you introduce mutable state, structural equality is no longer safe, and instead you have to rely on other inspection mechanisms, such as the IsDirty flag seen in this, and the previous, article. This makes the tests slightly more brittle, because it tends to pull towards interaction-based testing.

While you can implement the State monad in both F# and C#, it's probably more pragmatic to express state-based tests using mutable state and the occasional IsDirty flag. As always, there's no panacea.

While this article concludes the series on moving towards state-based testing, I think that an appendix on Test Spies is in order.

Next: A pure Test Spy.

Comments

While F# is a functional-first language, it's okay to occasionally be pragmatic and use mutable state, for example to easily write some sustainable state-based tests.

This article is an instalment in an article series about how to move from interaction-based testing to state-based testing. In the previous article, you saw how to write state-based tests in Haskell. In this article, you'll see how to apply what you've learned in F#.

The code shown in this article is available on GitHub.

A function to connect two users #

This article, like the others in this series, implements an operation to connect two users. I explain the example in details in my two Clean Coders videos, Church Visitor and Preserved in translation.

Like in the previous Haskell example, in this article we'll start with the implementation, and then see how to unit test it.

// ('a -> Result<User,UserLookupError>) -> (User -> unit) -> 'a -> 'a -> HttpResponse<User>
let post lookupUser updateUser userId otherUserId =
    let userRes =
        lookupUser userId |> Result.mapError (function
            | InvalidId -> "Invalid user ID."
            | NotFound  -> "User not found.")
    let otherUserRes =
        lookupUser otherUserId |> Result.mapError (function
            | InvalidId -> "Invalid ID for other user."
            | NotFound  -> "Other user not found.")
 
    let connect = result {
        let! user = userRes
        let! otherUser = otherUserRes
        addConnection user otherUser |> updateUser
        return otherUser }
 
    match connect with Ok u -> OK u | Error msg -> BadRequest msg

While the original C# example used Constructor Injection, the above post function uses partial application for Dependency Injection. The two function arguments lookupUser and updateUser represent interactions with a database. Since functions are polymorphic, however, it's possible to replace them with Test Doubles.

A Fake database #

Like in the Haskell example, you can implement a Fake database in F#. It's also possible to implement the State monad in F#, but there's less need for it. F# is a functional-first language, but you can also write mutable code if need be. You could, then, choose to be pragmatic and base your Fake database on mutable state.

type FakeDB () =
    let users = Dictionary<int, User> ()
 
    member val IsDirty = false with get, set
 
    member this.AddUser user =
        this.IsDirty <- true
        users.Add (user.UserId, user)
 
    member this.TryFind i =
        match users.TryGetValue i with
        | false, _ -> None
        | true,  u -> Some u
 
    member this.LookupUser s =
        match Int32.TryParse s with
        | false, _ -> Error InvalidId
        | true, i ->
            match users.TryGetValue i with
            | false, _ -> Error NotFound
            | true, u -> Ok u
 
    member this.UpdateUser u =
        this.IsDirty <- true
        users.[u.UserId] <- u

This FakeDB type is a class that wraps a mutable dictionary. While it 'implements' LookupUser and UpdateUser, it also exposes what xUnit Test Patterns calls a Retrieval Interface: an API that tests can use to examine the state of the object.

Immutable values normally have structural equality. This means that two values are considered equal if they contain the same constituent values, and have the same structure. Mutable objects, on the other hand, typically have reference equality. This makes it harder to compare two objects, which is, however, what almost all unit testing is about. You compare expected state with actual state.

In the previous article, the Fake database was simply an immutable dictionary. This meant that tests could easily compare expected and actual values, since they were immutable. When you use a mutable object, like the above dictionary, this is harder. Instead, what I chose to do here was to introduce an IsDirty flag. This enables easy verification of whether or not the database changed.

Happy path test case #

This is all you need in terms of Test Doubles. You now have test-specific LookupUser and UpdateUser methods that you can pass to the post function.

Like in the previous article, you can start by exercising the happy path where a user successfully connects with another user:

[<Fact>]
let ``Users successfully connect`` () = Property.check <| property {
    let! user = Gen.user
    let! otherUser = Gen.withOtherId user
    let db = FakeDB ()
    db.AddUser user
    db.AddUser otherUser
 
    let actual = post db.LookupUser db.UpdateUser (string user.UserId) (string otherUser.UserId)
 
    test <@ db.TryFind user.UserId
            |> Option.exists
                (fun u -> u.ConnectedUsers |> List.contains otherUser) @>
    test <@ isOK actual @> }

All tests in this article use xUnit.net 2.3.1, Unquote 4.0.0, and Hedgehog 0.7.0.0.

This test first adds two valid users to the Fake database db. It then calls the post function, passing the db.LookupUser and db.UpdateUser methods as arguments. Finally, it verifies that the 'first' user's ConnectedUsers now contains the otherUser. It also verifies that actual represents a 200 OK HTTP response.

Missing user test case #

While there's one happy-path test case, there's four other test cases left. One of these is when the first user doesn't exist:

[<Fact>]
let ``Users don't connect when user doesn't exist`` () = Property.check <| property {
    let! i = Range.linear 1 1_000_000 |> Gen.int
    let! otherUser = Gen.user
    let db = FakeDB ()
    db.AddUser otherUser
    db.IsDirty <- false
    let uniqueUserId = string (otherUser.UserId + i)
 
    let actual = post db.LookupUser db.UpdateUser uniqueUserId (string otherUser.UserId)
 
    test <@ not db.IsDirty @>
    test <@ isBadRequest actual @> }

This test adds one valid user to the Fake database. Once it's done with configuring the database, it sets IsDirty to false. The AddUser method sets IsDirty to true, so it's important to reset the flag before the act phase of the test. You could consider this a bit of a hack, but I think it makes the intent of the test clear. This is, however, a position I'm ready to reassess should the tests evolve to make this design awkward.

As explained in the previous article, this test case requires an ID of a user that doesn't exist. Since this is a property-based test, there's a risk that Hedgehog might generate a number i equal to otherUser.UserId. One way to get around that problem is to add the two numbers together. Since i is generated from the range 1 - 1,000,000, uniqueUserId is guaranteed to be different from otherUser.UserId.

The test verifies that the state of the database didn't change (that IsDirty is still false), and that actual represents a 400 Bad Request HTTP response.

Remaining test cases #

You can write the remaining three test cases in the same vein:

[<Fact>]
let ``Users don't connect when other user doesn't exist`` () = Property.check <| property {
    let! i = Range.linear 1 1_000_000 |> Gen.int
    let! user = Gen.user
    let db = FakeDB ()
    db.AddUser user
    db.IsDirty <- false
    let uniqueOtherUserId = string (user.UserId + i)
 
    let actual = post db.LookupUser db.UpdateUser (string user.UserId) uniqueOtherUserId 
 
    test <@ not db.IsDirty @>
    test <@ isBadRequest actual @> }
 
[<Fact>]
let ``Users don't connect when user Id is invalid`` () = Property.check <| property {
    let! s = Gen.alphaNum |> Gen.string (Range.linear 0 100) |> Gen.filter isIdInvalid
    let! otherUser = Gen.user
    let db = FakeDB ()
    db.AddUser otherUser
    db.IsDirty <- false
 
    let actual = post db.LookupUser db.UpdateUser s (string otherUser.UserId)
 
    test <@ not db.IsDirty @>
    test <@ isBadRequest actual @> }
 
[<Fact>]
let ``Users don't connect when other user Id is invalid`` () = Property.check <| property {
    let! s = Gen.alphaNum |> Gen.string (Range.linear 0 100) |> Gen.filter isIdInvalid
    let! user = Gen.user
    let db = FakeDB ()
    db.AddUser user
    db.IsDirty <- false
 
    let actual = post db.LookupUser db.UpdateUser (string user.UserId) s
 
    test <@ not db.IsDirty @>
    test <@ isBadRequest actual @> }

All tests inspect the state of the Fake database after the calling the post function. The exact interactions between post and db aren't specified. Instead, these tests rely on setting up the initial state, exercising the System Under Test, and verifying the final state. These are all state-based tests that avoid over-specifying the interactions.

Summary #

While the previous Haskell example demonstrated that it's possible to write state-based unit tests in a functional style, when using F#, it sometimes make sense to leverage the object-oriented features already available in the .NET framework, such as mutable dictionaries. It would have been possible to write purely functional state-based tests in F# as well, by porting the Haskell examples, but here, I wanted to demonstrate that this isn't required.

I tend to be of the opinion that it's only possible to be pragmatic if you know how to be dogmatic, but now that we know how to write state-based tests in a strictly functional style, I think it's fine to be pragmatic and use a bit of mutable state in F#. The benefit of this is that it now seems clear how to apply what we've learned to the original C# example.

Next: An example of state-based testing in C#.

As a programmer, your job is to make technical decisions. Make some more.

When I speak at conferences, people often come and talk to me. (I welcome that, BTW.) Among all the conversations I've had over the years, there's a pattern to some of them. The attendee will start by telling me how inspired (s)he is by the talk I just gave, or something I've written. That's gratifying, and a good way to start a conversation, but is often followed up like this:

Attendee: "I just wish that we could do something like that in our organisation..."

Let's just say that here we're talking about test-driven development, or perhaps just unit testing. Nothing too controversial. I'd typically respond,

Me: "Why can't you?"

Attendee: "Our boss won't let us..."

That's unfortunate. If your boss has explicitly forbidden you to write and run unit tests, then there's not much you can do. Let me make this absolutely clear: I'm not going on record saying that you should actively disobey a direct order (unless it's unethical, that is). I do wonder, however:

Why is the boss even involved in that decision?

It seems to me that programmers often defer too much authority to their managers.

A note on culture #

I'd like to preface the rest of this article with my own context. I've spent most of my programming career in Danish organisations. Even when I worked for Microsoft, I worked for Danish subsidiaries, with Danish managers.

The power distance in Denmark is (in)famously short. It's not unheard of for individual contributors to question their superiors' decisions; sometimes to their face, and sometimes even when other people witness this. When done respectfully (which it often is), this can be extremely efficient. Managers are as fallible as the rest of us, and often their subordinates know of details that could impact a decision that a manager is about to make. Immediately discussing such details can help ensure that good decisions are made, and bad decisions are cancelled.

This helps managers make better decisions, so enlightened managers welcome feedback.

In general, Danish employees also tend to have a fair degree of autonomy. What I'll suggest in this article is unlikely to get you fired in Denmark. Please use your own judgement if you consider transplanting the following to your own culture.

Technical decisions #

If your job is programmer, software developer, or similar, the value you add to the team is that you bring technical expertise. Maybe some of your colleagues are programmers as well, but together, you are the people with the technical expertise.

Even if the project manager or other superiors used to program, unless they're also writing code for the current code base, they only have general technical expertise, but not specific expertise related to the code base you're working with. The people with most technical expertise are you and your colleagues.

You are decision makers.

Whenever you interact with your code base, you make technical decisions.

In order to handle incoming HTTP requests to a /reservations resource, you may first decide to create a new file called ReservationsController.cs. You'd most likely also decide to open that file and start adding code to it.

Perhaps you add a method called Post that takes a Reservation argument. Perhaps you decide to inject an IMaîtreD dependency.

At various steps along the way, you may decide to compile the code.

Once you think that you've made enough changes to address your current work item, you may decide to run the program to see if it works. For a web-based piece of software, that typically involves starting up a browser and somehow interacting with the service. If your program is a web site, you may start at the front page, log in, click around, and fill in some forms. If your program is a REST API, you may interact with it via Fiddler or Postman (I prefer curl or Furl, but most people I've met still prefer something they can click on, it seems).

What often happens is that your changes don't work the first time around, so you'll have to troubleshoot. Perhaps you decide to use a debugger.

How many decisions are that?

I just described seven or eight types of the sort of decisions you make as a programmer. You make such decisions all the time. Do you ask your managers permission before you start a debugging session? Before you create a new file? Before you name a variable?

Of course you don't. You're the technical expert. There's no-one better equipped than you or your team members to make those decisions.

Decide to add unit tests #

If you want to add unit tests, why don't you just decide to add them? If you want to apply test-driven development, why don't you just do so?

A unit test is one or more code files. You're already authorised to make decisions about adding files.

You can run a test suite instead of launching the software every time you want to interact with it. It's likely to be faster, even.

Why should you ask permission to do that?

Decide to refactor #

Another complaint I hear is that people aren't allowed to refactor.

Why are you even asking permission to refactor?

Refactoring means reorganising the code without changing the behaviour of the system. Another word for that is editing the code. It's okay. You're already permitted to edit code. It's part of your job description.

I think I know what the underlying problem is, though...

Make technical decisions in the small #

As an individual contributor, you're empowered to make small-scale technical decisions. These are decisions that are unlikely to impact schedules or allocation of programmers, including new hires. Big decisions probably should involve your manager.

I have an inkling of why people feel that they need permission to refactor. It's because the refactoring they have in mind is going to take weeks. Weeks in which nothing else can be done. Weeks where perhaps the code doesn't even compile.

Many years ago (but not as many as I'd like it to be), my colleague and I had what Eric Evans in DDD calls a breakthrough. We wanted to refactor towards deeper insight. What prompted the insight was a new feature that we had to add, and we'd been throwing design ideas back and forth for some time before the new insight arrived.

We could implement the new feature if we changed one of the core abstractions in our domain model, but it required substantial changes to the existing code base. We informed our manager of our new insight and our plan, estimating that it would take less than a week to make the changes and implement the new feature. Our manager agreed with the plan.

Two weeks later our code hadn't been in a compilable state for a week. Our manager pulled me away to tell me, quietly and equitably, that he was not happy with our lack of progress. I could only concur.

After more heroic work, we finally managed to complete the changes and implement the new feature. Nonetheless, blocking all other development for two-three weeks in order to make a change isn't acceptable.

That sort of change is a big decision because it impacts other team members, schedules, and perhaps overall business plans. Don't make those kinds of decisions without consulting with stakeholders.

This still leaves, I believe, lots of room for individual decision-making in the small. What I learned from the experience I just recounted was not to engage in big changes to a code base. Learn how to make multiple incremental changes instead. In case that's completely impossible, add the new model side-by-side with the old model, and incrementally change over. That's what I should have done those many years ago.

Don't be sneaky #

When I give talks about the blessings of functional programming, I sometimes get into another type of discussion.

Attendee: It's so inspiring how beautiful and simple complex domain models become in F#. How can we do the same in C#?

Me: You can't. If you're already using C#, you should strongly consider F# if you wish to do functional programming. Since it's also a .NET language, you can gradually introduce F# code and mix the compiled code with your existing C# code.

Attendee: Yes... [already getting impatient with me] But we can't do that...

Me: Why not?

Attendee: Because our manager will not allow it.

Based on the suggestions I've already made here, you may expect me to say that that's another technical decision that you should make without asking permission. Like the previous example about blocking refactorings, however, this is another large-scale decision.

Your manager may be concerned that it'd be hard to find new employees if the code base is written in some niche language. I tend to disagree with that position, but I do understand why a manager would take that position. While I think it suboptimal to restrict an entire development organisation to a single language (whether it's C#, Java, C++, Ruby, etc.), I'll readily accept that language choice is a strategic decision.

If every programmer got to choose the programming language they prefer the most that day, you'd have code bases written in dozens of different languages. While you can train bright new hires to learn a new language or two, it's unrealistic that a new employee will be able to learn thirty different languages in a short while.

I find it reasonable that a manager has the final word on the choice of language, even when I often disagree with the decisions.

The outcome usually is that people are stuck with C# (or Java, or...). Hence the question: How can we do functional programming in C#?

I'll give the answer that I often give here on the blog: mu (unask the question). You can, in fact, translate functional concepts to C#, but the result is so non-idiomatic that only the syntax remains of C#:

public static IReservationsInstruction<TResult> Select<T, TResult>(
    this IReservationsInstruction<T> source,
    Func<T, TResult> selector)
{
    return source.Match<IReservationsInstruction<TResult>>(
        isReservationInFuture: t =>
            new IsReservationInFuture<TResult>(
                new Tuple<Reservation, Func<bool, TResult>>(
                    t.Item1,
                    b => selector(t.Item2(b)))),
        readReservations: t =>
            new ReadReservations<TResult>(
                new Tuple<DateTimeOffset, Func<IReadOnlyCollection<Reservation>, TResult>>(
                    t.Item1,
                    d => selector(t.Item2(d)))),
        create: t =>
            new Create<TResult>(
                new Tuple<Reservation, Func<int, TResult>>(
                    t.Item1,
                    r => selector(t.Item2(r)))));
}

Keep in mind the manager's motivation for standardising on C#. It's often related to concerns about being able to hire new employees, or move employees from project to project.

If you write 'functional' C#, you'll end up with code like the above, or the following real-life example:

return await sendRequest(
        ApiMethodNames.InitRegistration,
        new GSObject())
    .Map(r => ValidateResponse.Validate(r)
        .MapFailure(_ => ErrorResponse.RegisterErrorResponse()))
    .Bind(r => r.RetrieveField("regToken"))
    .BindAsync(token =>
        sendRequest(
                ApiMethodNames.RegisterAccount,
                CreateRegisterRequest(
                    mailAddress,
                    password,
                    token))
            .Map(ValidateResponse.Validate)
            .Bind(response => getIdentity(response)
                .ToResult(ErrorResponse.ExternalServiceResponseInvalid)))
    .Map(id => GigyaIdentity.CreateNewSiteUser(id.UserId, mailAddress));

(I'm indebted to Rune Ibsen for this example.)

A new hire can have ten years of C# experience and still have no chance in a code base like that. You'll first have to teach him or her functional programming. If you can do that, you might as well also teach a new language, like F#.

It's my experience that learning the syntax of a new language is easy, and usually doesn't take much time. The hard part is learning a new way to think.

Writing 'functional' C# makes it doubly hard on new team members. Not only do they have to learn a new paradigm (functional programming), but they have to learn it in a language unsuited for that paradigm.

That's why I think you should unask the question. If your manager doesn't want to allow F#, then writing 'functional' C# is just being sneaky. That'd be obeying the letter of the law while breaking the spirit of it. That is, in my opinion, immoral. Don't be sneaky.

Summary #

As a professional programmer, your job is to be a technical expert. In normal circumstances (at least the ones I know from my own career), you have agency. In order to get anything done, you make small decisions all the time, such as editing code. That's not only okay, but expected of you.

Some decision, on the other hand, can have substantial ramifications. Choosing to write code in an unsanctioned language tends to fall on the side where a manager should be involved in the decision.

In between is a grey area.

I don't even consider adding unit tests to be in the grey area, but some refactorings may be.

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

To navigate grey areas you need a moral compass.

I'll let you be the final judge of what you can get away with, but I consider it both appropriate and ethical to make the decision to add unit tests, and to continually improve code bases. You shouldn't have to ask permission to do that.

Comments

How do you do state-based testing when state is immutable? You use the State monad.

This article is an instalment in an article series about how to move from interaction-based testing to state-based testing. In the previous article, you saw an example of an interaction-based unit test written in C#. The problem that this article series attempts to address is that interaction-based testing can lead to what xUnit Test Patterns calls Fragile Tests, because the tests get coupled to implementation details, instead of overall behaviour.

My experience is that functional programming is better aligned with unit testing because functional design is intrinsically testable. While I believe that functional programming is no panacea, it still seems to me that we can learn many valuable lessons about programming from it.

People often ask me about F# programming: How do I know that my F# code is functional?

I sometimes wonder that myself, about my own F# code. One can certainly choose to ignore such a question as irrelevant, and I sometimes do, as well. Still, in my experience, asking such questions can create learning opportunities.

The best answer that I've found is: Port the F# code to Haskell.

Haskell enforces referential transparency via its compiler. If Haskell code compiles, it's functional. In this article, then, I take the problem from the previous article and port it to Haskell.

The code shown in this article is available on GitHub.

A function to connect two users #

In the previous article, you saw implementation and test coverage of a piece of software functionality to connect two users with each other. This was a simplification of the example running through my two Clean Coders videos, Church Visitor and Preserved in translation.

In contrast to the previous article, we'll start with the implementation of the System Under Test (SUT).

post :: Monad m =>
        (a -> m (Either UserLookupError User)) ->
        (User -> m ()) ->
        a ->
        a ->
        m (HttpResponse User)
post lookupUser updateUser userId otherUserId = do
  userRes <- first (\case
      InvalidId -> "Invalid user ID."
      NotFound  -> "User not found.")
    <$> lookupUser userId
  otherUserRes <- first (\case
      InvalidId -> "Invalid ID for other user."
      NotFound  -> "Other user not found.")
    <$> lookupUser otherUserId

  connect <- runExceptT $ do
      user <- ExceptT $ return userRes
      otherUser <- ExceptT $ return otherUserRes
      lift $ updateUser $ addConnection user otherUser
      return otherUser

  return $ either BadRequest OK connect

This is as direct a translation of the C# code as makes sense. If I'd only been implementing the desired functionality in Haskell, without having to port existing code, I'd designed the code differently.

This post function uses partial application as an analogy to dependency injection, but in order to enable potentially impure operations to take place, everything must happen inside of some monad. While the production code must ultimately run in the IO monad in order to interact with a database, tests can choose to run in another monad.

In the C# example, two dependencies are injected into the class that defines the Post method. In the above Haskell function, these two dependencies are instead passed as function arguments. Notice that both functions return values in the monad m.

The intent of the lookupUser argument is that it'll query a database with a user ID. It'll return the user if present, but it could also return a UserLookupError, which is a simple sum type:

data UserLookupError = InvalidId | NotFound deriving (Show, Eq)

If both users are found, the function connects the users and calls the updateUser function argument. The intent of this 'dependency' is that it updates the database. This is recognisably a Command, since its return type is m () - unit (()) is equivalent to void.

State-based testing #

How do you unit test such a function? How do you use Mocks and Stubs in Haskell? You don't; you don't have to. While the post method can be impure (when m is IO), it doesn't have to be. Functional design is intrinsically testable, but that proposition depends on purity. Thus, it's worth figuring out how to keep the post function pure in the context of unit testing.

While IO implies impurity, most common monads are pure. Which one should you choose? You could attempt to entirely 'erase' the monadic quality of the post function with the Identity monad, but if you do that, you can't verify whether or not updateUser was invoked.

While you could write an ad-hoc Mock using, for example, the Writer monad, it might be a better choice to investigate if something closer to state-based testing would be possible.

In an object-oriented context, state-based testing implies that you exercise the SUT, which mutates some state, and then you verify that the (mutated) state matches your expectations. You can't do that when you test a pure function, but you can examine the state of the function's return value. The State monad is an obvious choice, then.

A Fake database #

Haskell's State monad is parametrised on the state type as well as the normal 'value type', so in order to be able to test the post function, you'll have to figure out what type of state to use. The interactions implied by the post function's lookupUser and updateUser arguments are those of database interactions. A Fake database seems an obvious choice.

For the purposes of testing the post function, an in-memory database implemented using a Map is appropriate:

type DB = Map Integer User

This is simply a dictionary keyed by Integer values and containing User values. You can implement compatible lookupUser and updateUser functions with State DB as the Monad. The updateUser function is the easiest one to implement:

updateUser :: User -> State DB ()
updateUser user = modify $ Map.insert (userId user) user

This simply inserts the user into the database, using the userId as the key. The type of the function is compatible with the general requirement of User -> m (), since here, m is State DB.

The lookupUser Fake implementation is a bit more involved:

lookupUser :: String -> State DB (Either UserLookupError User)
lookupUser s = do
  let maybeInt = readMaybe s :: Maybe Integer
  let eitherInt = maybe (Left InvalidId) Right maybeInt
  db <- get
  return $ eitherInt >>= maybe (Left NotFound) Right . flip Map.lookup db

First, consider the type. The function takes a String value as an argument and returns a State DB (Either UserLookupError User). The requirement is a function compatible with the type a -> m (Either UserLookupError User). This works when a is String and m is, again, State DB.

The entire function is written in do notation, where the inferred Monad is, indeed, State DB. The first line attempts to parse the String into an Integer. Since the built-in readMaybe function returns a Maybe Integer, the next line uses the maybe function to handle the two possible cases, converting the Nothing case into the Left InvalidId value, and the Just case into a Right value.

It then uses the State module's get function to access the database db, and finally attempt a lookup against that Map. Again, maybe is used to convert the Maybe value returned by Map.lookup into an Either value.

Happy path test case #

This is all you need in terms of Test Doubles. You now have test-specific lookupUser and updateUser functions that you can pass to the post function.

Like in the previous article, you can start by exercising the happy path where a user successfully connects with another user:

testProperty "Users successfully connect" $ \
  user otherUser -> runStateTest $ do
 
  put $ Map.fromList [toDBEntry user, toDBEntry otherUser]

  actual <- post lookupUser updateUser (show $ userId user) (show $ userId otherUser)
 
  db <- get
  return $
    isOK actual &&
    any (elem otherUser . connectedUsers) (Map.lookup (userId user) db)

Here I'm inlining test cases as anonymous functions - this time expressing the tests as QuickCheck properties. I'll later return to the runStateTest helper function, but first I want to focus on the test body itself. It's written in do notation, and specifically, it runs in the State DB monad.

user and otherUser are input arguments to the property. These are both User values, since the test also defines Arbitrary instances for that type (not shown in this article; see the source code repository for details).

The first step in the test is to 'save' both users in the Fake database. This is easily done by converting each User value to a database entry:

toDBEntry :: User -> (Integer, User)
toDBEntry = userId &&& id

Recall that the Fake database is nothing but an alias over Map Integer User, so the only operation required to turn a User into a database entry is to extract the key.

The next step in the test is to exercise the SUT, passing the test-specific lookupUser and updateUser Test Doubles to the post function, together with the user IDs converted to String values.

In the assert phase of the test, it first extracts the current state of the database, using the State library's built-in get function. It then verifies that actual represents a 200 OK value, and that the user entry in the database now contains otherUser as a connected user.

Missing user test case #

While there's one happy-path test case, there's four other test cases left. One of these is when the first user doesn't exist:

testProperty "Users don't connect when user doesn't exist" $ \
  (Positive i) otherUser -> runStateTest $ do
 
  let db = Map.fromList [toDBEntry otherUser]
  put db
  let uniqueUserId = show $ userId otherUser + i
 
  actual <- post lookupUser updateUser uniqueUserId (show $ userId otherUser)
 
  assertPostFailure db actual

What ought to trigger this test case is that the 'first' user doesn't exist, even if the otherUser does exist. For this reason, the test inserts the otherUser into the Fake database.

Since the test is a QuickCheck property, i could be any positive Integer value - including the userId of otherUser. In order to properly exercise the test case, however, you'll need to call the post function with a uniqueUserId - thas it: an ID which is guaranteed to not be equal to the userId of otherUser. There's several options for achieving this guarantee (including, as you'll see soon, the ==> operator), but a simple way is to add a non-zero number to the number you need to avoid.

You then exercise the post function and, as a verification, call a reusable assertPostFailure function:

assertPostFailure :: (Eq s, Monad m) => s -> HttpResponse a -> StateT s m Bool
assertPostFailure stateBefore resp = do
  stateAfter <- get
  let stateDidNotChange = stateBefore == stateAfter
  return $ stateDidNotChange && isBadRequest resp

This function verifies that the state of the database didn't change, and that the response value represents a 400 Bad Request HTTP response. This verification doesn't actually verify that the error message associated with the BadRequest case is the expected message, like in the previous article. This would, however, involve a fairly trivial change to the code.

Missing other user test case #

Similar to the above test case, users will also fail to connect if the 'other user' doesn't exist. The property is almost identical:

testProperty "Users don't connect when other user doesn't exist" $ \
  (Positive i) user -> runStateTest $ do
  
  let db = Map.fromList [toDBEntry user]
  put db
  let uniqueOtherUserId = show $ userId user + i
 
  actual <- post lookupUser updateUser (show $ userId user) uniqueOtherUserId
 
  assertPostFailure db actual

Since this test body is so similar to the previous test, I'm not going to give you a detailed walkthrough. I did, however, promise to describe the runStateTest helper function:

runStateTest :: State (Map k a) b -> b
runStateTest = flip evalState Map.empty

Since this is a one-liner, you could also write all the tests by simply in-lining that little expression, but I thought that it made the tests more readable to give this function an explicit name.

It takes any State (Map k a) b and runs it with an empty map. Thus, all State-valued functions, like the tests, must explicitly put data into the state. This is also what the tests do.

Notice that all the tests return State values. For example, the assertPostFailure function returns StateT s m Bool, of which State s Bool is an alias. This fits State (Map k a) b when s is Map k a, which again is aliased to DB. Reducing all of this, the tests are simply functions that return Bool.

Invalid user ID test cases #

Finally, you can also cover the two test cases where one of the user IDs is invalid:

testProperty "Users don't connect when user Id is invalid" $ \
  s otherUser -> isIdInvalid s ==> runStateTest $ do
 
  let db = Map.fromList [toDBEntry otherUser]
  put db
 
  actual <- post lookupUser updateUser s (show $ userId otherUser)
 
  assertPostFailure db actual
 
,
testProperty "Users don't connect when other user Id is invalid" $ \
  s user -> isIdInvalid s ==> runStateTest $ do
 
  let db = Map.fromList [toDBEntry user]
  put db
 
  actual <- post lookupUser updateUser (show $ userId user) s
 
  assertPostFailure db actual

Both of these properties take a String value s as input. When QuickCheck generates a String, that could be any String value. Both tests require that the value is an invalid user ID. Specifically, it mustn't be possible to parse the string into an Integer. If you don't constrain QuickCheck, it'll generate various strings, including e.g. "8" and other strings that can be parsed as numbers.

In the above "Users don't connect when user doesn't exist" test, you saw how one way to explicitly model constraints on data is to project a seed value in such a way that the constraint always holds. Another way is to use QuickCheck's built-in ==> operator to filter out undesired values. In this example, both tests employ the isIdInvalid function:

isIdInvalid :: String -> Bool
isIdInvalid s =
  let userInt = readMaybe s :: Maybe Integer
  in isNothing userInt

Using isIdInvalid with the ==> operator guarantees that s is an invalid ID.

Summary #

While state-based testing may, at first, sound incompatible with strictly functional programming, it's not only possible with the State monad, but even, with good language support, easily done.

The tests shown in this article aren't concerned with the interactions between the SUT and its dependencies. Instead, they compare the initial state with the state after exercising the SUT. Comparing values, even complex data structures such as maps, tends to be trivial in functional programming. Immutable values typically have built-in structural equality (in Haskell signified by the automatic Eq type class), which makes comparing them trivial.

Now that we know that state-based testing is possible even with Haskell's enforced purity, it should be clear that we can repeat the feat in F#.

Next: An example of state based-testing in F#.

A trivial observation made explicit.

You'd think that it's evident that code quality and software quality are two different things. Yet, I often see or hear arguments about one or the other that indicates to me that some people don't make that distinction. I wonder why; I do.

Software quality #

There's a school of thought leaders who advocate that, ultimately, we write code to solve problems, or to improve life, for people. I have nothing against that line of reasoning; it's just not one that I pursue much. Why should I use my energy on this message when someone like Dan North does it so much better than I could?

Dan North is far from the only person making the point that our employers, or clients, or end-users don't care about the code; he is, in my opinion, one of the best communicators in that field. It makes sense that, with that perspective on software development, you'd invent something like behaviour-driven development.

The evaluation criterion used in this discourse is one of utility. Does the software serve a purpose? Does it do it well?

In that light, quality software is software that serves its purpose beyond expectation. It rarely, if ever, crashes. It's easy to use. It's sufficiently responsive. It's pretty. It works both on-line and off-line. Attributes like that are externally observable qualities.

You can write quality software in many different languages, using various styles. When you evaluate the externally observable qualities of software, the code is invisible. It's not part of the evaluation.

It seems to me that some people try to make an erroneous conclusion from this premise. They'd say that since no employer, client, or end user evaluates the software based on the code that produced it, then no one cares about the code.

Code quality #

It's easy to refute that argument. All you have to do is to come up with a counter-example. You just have to find one person who cares about the code. That's easy.

You care about the code.

Perhaps you react negatively to that assertion. Perhaps you say: "No! I'm not one of those effete aesthetes who only program in Plankalkül." Fine. Maybe you're not the type who likes to polish the code; maybe you're the practical, down-to-earth type who just likes to get stuff done, so that your employer/client/end-user is happy.

Even so, I think that you still care about the code. Have you ever looked with bewilderment at a piece of code and thought: "Who the hell wrote this piece of shit!?" How many WTFs/m is your code?

I think every programmer cares about their code bases; if not in an active manner, then at least in a passive way. Bad code can seriously impede progress. I've seen more than one organisation effectively go out of business because of bad legacy code.

Code quality is when you care about the readability and malleability of the code. It's when you care about the code's ability to sustain the business, not only today, but also in the future.

Sustainable code #

I often get the impression that some people look at code quality and software quality as a (false) dichotomy.

Such arguments often seem to imply that you can't have one without sacrificing the other. You must choose.

The reality is, of course, that you can do both.

At the intersection between software and code quality the code sustains the business both now, and in the future.

Yes, you should write code such that it produces software that provides value here and now, but you should also do your best to enable it to provide value in the future. This is sustainable code. It's code that can sustain the organisation during its lifetime.

No gold-plating #

To be clear: this is not a call for gold plating or speculative generality. You probably can't predict the future needs of the stake-holders.

Quality code doesn't have to be able to perfectly address all future requirements. In order to be sustainable, though, it should be easy to modify in the future, or perhaps just easy to throw away and rewrite. I think a good start is to write humane code; code that fits in your brain.

At least, do your best to avoid writing legacy code.

Summary #

Software quality and code quality can co-exist. You can write quality code that compiles to quality software, but one doesn't imply the other. These are two independent quality dimensions.

An example of using Mocks and Stubs for unit testing in C#.

This article is an instalment in an article series about how to move from interaction-based testing to state-based testing. In this series, you'll be presented with some alternatives to interaction-based testing with Mocks and Stubs. Before we reach the alternatives, however, we need to establish an example of interaction-based testing, so that you have something against which you can compare those alternatives. In this article, I'll present a simple example, in the form of C# code.

The code shown in this article is available on GitHub.

Connect two users #

For the example, I'll use a simplified version of the example that runs through my two Clean Coders videos, Church Visitor and Preserved in translation.

The desired functionality is simple: implement a REST API that enables one user to connect to another user. You could imagine some sort of social media platform, or essentially any sort of online service where users might be interested in connecting with, or following, other users.

In essence, you could imagine that a user interface makes an HTTP POST request against our REST API:

POST /connections/42 HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "otherUserId": 1337
}

Let's further imagine that we implement the desired functionality with a C# method with this signature:

public IHttpActionResult Post(string userId, string otherUserId)

We'll return to the implementation later, but I want to point out a few things.

First, notice that both userId and otherUserId are string arguments. While the above example encodes both IDs as numbers, essentially, both URLs and JSON are text-based. Following Postel's law, the method should also accept JSON like { "otherUserId": "1337" }. That's the reason the Post method takes string arguments instead of int arguments.

Second, the return type is IHttpActionResult. Don't worry if you don't know that interface. It's just a way to model HTTP responses, such as 200 OK or 400 Bad Request.

Depending on the input values, and the state of the application, several outcomes are possible:

The assumption here is that the underlying user database uses integers as row IDs.

When both users are found, the other user should be returned in the HTTP response, like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
    "id": 1337,
    "name": "ploeh",
    "connections": [{
        "id": 42,
        "name": "fnaah"
    }, {
        "id": 2112,
        "name": "ndøh"
    }]
}

The intent is that when the first user (e.g. the one with the 42 ID) successfully connects to user 1337, a user interface can show the full details of the other user, including the other user's connections.

Happy path test case #

Since there's five distinct outcomes, you ought to write at least five test cases. You could start with the happy-path case, where both user IDs are well-formed and the users exist.

All tests in this article use xUnit.net 2.3.1, Moq 4.8.1, and AutoFixture 4.1.0.

[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersSuccessfullyConnect(
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserReader> readerTD,
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserRepository> repoTD,
    User user,
    User otherUser,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(user.Id.ToString()))
        .Returns(Result.Success<User, IUserLookupError>(user));
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(otherUser.Id.ToString()))
        .Returns(Result.Success<User, IUserLookupError>(otherUser));
 
    var actual = sut.Post(user.Id.ToString(), otherUser.Id.ToString());
 
    var ok = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<OkNegotiatedContentResult<User>>(
        actual);
    Assert.Equal(otherUser, ok.Content);
    repoTD.Verify(r => r.Update(user));
    Assert.Contains(otherUser.Id, user.Connections);
}

To be clear, as far as Overspecified Software goes, this isn't a bad test. It only has two Test Doubles, readerTD and repoTD. My current habit is to name any Test Double with the TD suffix (for Test Double), instead of explicitly naming them readerStub and repoMock. The latter would have been more correct, though, since the Mock<IUserReader> object is consistently used as a Stub, whereas the Mock<IUserRepository> object is used only as a Mock. This is as it should be, because it follows the rule that you should use Mocks for Commands, Stubs for Queries.

IUserRepository.Update is, indeed a Command:

public interface IUserRepository
{
    void Update(User user);
}

Since the method returns void, unless it doesn't do anything at all, the only thing it can do is to somehow change the state of the system. The test verifies that IUserRepository.Update was invoked with the appropriate input argument.

This is fine.

I'd like to emphasise that this isn't the biggest problem with this test. A Mock like this verifies that a desired interaction took place. If IUserRepository.Update isn't called in this test case, it would constitute a defect. The software wouldn't have the desired behaviour, so the test ought to fail.

The signature of IUserReader.Lookup, on the other hand, implies that it's a Query:

public interface IUserReader
{
    IResult<User, IUserLookupError> Lookup(string id);
}

In C# and most other languages, you can't be sure that implementations of the Lookup method have no side effects. If, however, we assume that the code base in question obeys the Command Query Separation principle, then, by elimination, this must be a Query (since it's not a Command, because the return type isn't void).

For a detailed walkthrough of the IResult<S, E> interface, see my Preserved in translation video. It's just an Either with different terminology, though. Right is equivalent to SuccessResult, and Left corresponds to ErrorResult.

The test configures the IUserReader Stub twice. It's necessary to give the Stub some behaviour, but unfortunately you can't just use Moq's It.IsAny<string>() for configuration, because in order to model the test case, the reader should return two different objects for two different inputs.

This starts to look like Overspecified Software.

Ideally, a Stub should just be present to 'make happy noises' in case the SUT decides to interact with the dependency, but with these two Setup calls, the interaction is overspecified. The test is tightly coupled to how the SUT is implemented. If you change the interaction implemented in the Post method, you could break the test.

In any case, what the test does specify is that when you query the UserReader, it returns a Success object for both user lookups, a 200 OK result is returned, and the Update method was called with user.

Invalid user ID test case #

If the first user ID is invalid (i.e. not an integer) then the return value should represent 400 Bad Request and the message body should indicate as much. This test verifies that this is the case:

[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersFailToConnectWhenUserIdIsInvalid(
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserReader> readerTD,
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserRepository> repoTD,
    string userId,
    User otherUser,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    Assert.False(int.TryParse(userId, out var _));
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(userId))
        .Returns(Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(
            UserLookupError.InvalidId));
 
    var actual = sut.Post(userId, otherUser.Id.ToString());
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("Invalid user ID.", err.Message);
    repoTD.Verify(r => r.Update(It.IsAny<User>()), Times.Never());
}

This test starts with a Guard Assertion that userId isn't an integer. This is mostly an artefact of using AutoFixture. Had you used specific example values, then this wouldn't have been necessary. On the other hand, had you written the test case as a property-based test, it would have been even more important to explicitly encode such a constraint.

Perhaps a better design would have been to use a domain-specific method to check for the validity of the ID, but there's always room for improvement.

This test is more brittle than it looks. It only defines what should happen when IUserReader.Lookup is called with the invalid userId. What happens if IUserReader.Lookup is called with the Id associated with otherUser?

This currently doesn't matter, so the test passes.

The test relies, however, on an implementation detail. This test implicitly assumes that the implementation short-circuits as soon as it discovers that userId is invalid. What if, however, you'd made some performance measurements, and you'd discovered that in most cases, the software would run faster if you Lookup both users in parallel?

Such an innocuous performance optimisation could break the test, because the behaviour of readerTD is unspecified for all other cases than for userId.

Invalid ID for other user test case #

What happens if the other user ID is invalid? This unit test exercises that test case:

[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersFailToConnectWhenOtherUserIdIsInvalid(
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserReader> readerTD,
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserRepository> repoTD,
    User user,
    string otherUserId,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    Assert.False(int.TryParse(otherUserId, out var _));
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(user.Id.ToString()))
        .Returns(Result.Success<User, IUserLookupError>(user));
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(otherUserId))
        .Returns(Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(
            UserLookupError.InvalidId));
 
    var actual = sut.Post(user.Id.ToString(), otherUserId);
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("Invalid ID for other user.", err.Message);
    repoTD.Verify(r => r.Update(It.IsAny<User>()), Times.Never());
}

Notice how the test configures readerTD twice: once for the Id associated with user, and once for otherUserId. Why does this test look different from the previous test?

Why is the first Setup required? Couldn't the arrange phase of the test just look like the following?

Assert.False(int.TryParse(otherUserId, out var _));
readerTD
    .Setup(r => r.Lookup(otherUserId))
    .Returns(Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(
        UserLookupError.InvalidId));

If you wrote the test like that, it would resemble the previous test (UsersFailToConnectWhenUserIdIsInvalid). The problem, though, is that if you remove the Setup for the valid user, the test fails.

This is another example of how the use of interaction-based testing makes the tests brittle. The tests are tightly coupled to the implementation.

Missing users test cases #

I don't want to belabour the point, so here's the two remaining tests:

[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersDoNotConnectWhenUserDoesNotExist(
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserReader> readerTD,
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserRepository> repoTD,
    string userId,
    User otherUser,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(userId))
        .Returns(Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(
            UserLookupError.NotFound));
 
    var actual = sut.Post(userId, otherUser.Id.ToString());
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("User not found.", err.Message);
    repoTD.Verify(r => r.Update(It.IsAny<User>()), Times.Never());
}
 
[Theory, UserManagementTestConventions]
public void UsersDoNotConnectWhenOtherUserDoesNotExist(
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserReader> readerTD,
    [Frozen]Mock<IUserRepository> repoTD,
    User user,
    int otherUserId,
    ConnectionsController sut)
{
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(user.Id.ToString()))
        .Returns(Result.Success<User, IUserLookupError>(user));
    readerTD
        .Setup(r => r.Lookup(otherUserId.ToString()))
        .Returns(Result.Error<User, IUserLookupError>(
            UserLookupError.NotFound));
 
    var actual = sut.Post(user.Id.ToString(), otherUserId.ToString());
 
    var err = Assert.IsAssignableFrom<BadRequestErrorMessageResult>(actual);
    Assert.Equal("Other user not found.", err.Message);
    repoTD.Verify(r => r.Update(It.IsAny<User>()), Times.Never());
}

Again, notice the asymmetry of these two tests. The top one passes with only one Setup of readerTD, whereas the bottom test requires two in order to pass.

You can add a second Setup to the top test to make the two tests equivalent, but people often forget to take such precautions. The result is Fragile Tests.

Post implementation #

In the spirit of test-driven development, I've shown you the tests before the implementation.

public class ConnectionsController : ApiController
{
    public ConnectionsController(
        IUserReader userReader,
        IUserRepository userRepository)
    {
        UserReader = userReader;
        UserRepository = userRepository;
    }
 
    public IUserReader UserReader { get; }
    public IUserRepository UserRepository { get; }
 
    public IHttpActionResult Post(string userId, string otherUserId)
    {
        var userRes = UserReader.Lookup(userId).SelectError(
            error => error.Accept(UserLookupError.Switch(
                onInvalidId: "Invalid user ID.",
                onNotFound:  "User not found.")));
        var otherUserRes = UserReader.Lookup(otherUserId).SelectError(
            error => error.Accept(UserLookupError.Switch(
                onInvalidId: "Invalid ID for other user.",
                onNotFound:  "Other user not found.")));
 
        var connect =
            from user in userRes
            from otherUser in otherUserRes
            select Connect(user, otherUser);
 
        return connect.SelectBoth(Ok, BadRequest).Bifold();
    }
 
    private User Connect(User user, User otherUser)
    {
        user.Connect(otherUser);
        UserRepository.Update(user);
 
        return otherUser;
    }
}

This is a simplified version of the code shown towards the end of my Preserved in translation video, so I'll refer you there for a detailed explanation.

Summary #

The premise of Refactoring is that in order to be able to refactor, the "precondition is [...] solid tests". In reality, many development organisations have the opposite experience. When programmers attempt to make changes to how their code is organised, tests break. In xUnit Test Patterns this problem is called Fragile Tests, and the cause is often Overspecified Software. This means that tests are tightly coupled to implementation details of the System Under Test (SUT).

It's easy to inadvertently fall into this trap when you use Mocks and Stubs, even when you follow the rule of using Mocks for Commands and Stubs for Queries. In my experience, it's often the explicit configuration of Stubs that tend to make tests brittle. A Command represents an intentional side effect, and you want to verify that such a side effect takes place. A Query, on the other hand, has no side effect, so a black-box test shouldn't be concerned with any interactions involving Queries.

Yet, using an 'isolation framework' such as Moq, FakeItEasy, NSubstitute, and so on, will pull you towards overspecifying the interactions the SUT has with its Query dependencies.

How can we improve? One strategy is to move towards a more functional design, which is intrinsically testable. In the next article, you'll see how to rewrite both tests and implementation in Haskell.

Next: An example of state-based testing in Haskell.

Comments

Indiscriminate use of Mocks and Stubs can lead to brittle test suites. A more functional design can make state-based testing easier, leading to more robust test suites.

The original premise of Refactoring was that in order to refactor, you must have a trustworthy suite of unit tests, so that you can be confident that you didn't break any functionality.

"to refactor, the essential precondition is [...] solid tests"

This is a well-known test smell. In xUnit Test Patterns this is called Fragile Test, and it's often caused by Overspecified Software. Even if you follow the proper practice of using Mocks for Commands, Stubs for Queries, you can still end up with a code base where the tests are highly coupled to implementation details of the software.

The cause is often that when relying on Mocks and Stubs, test verification hinges on how the System Under Test (SUT) interacts with its dependencies. For that reason, we can call such tests interaction-based tests. For more information, watch my Pluralsight course Advanced Unit Testing.

Lessons from functional programming #

Another way to verify the outcome of a test is to inspect the state of the system after exercising the SUT. We can, quite naturally, call this state-based testing. In object-oriented design, this can lead to other problems. Nat Pryce has pointed out that state-based testing breaks encapsulation.

Interestingly, in his article, Nat Pryce concludes:

"I have come to think of object oriented programming as an inversion of functional programming. In a lazy functional language data is pulled through functions that transform the data and combine it into a single result. In an object oriented program, data is pushed out in messages to objects that transform the data and push it out to other objects for further processing."

Functional programming is based on the fundamental principle of referential transparency, which, among other things, means that data must be immutable. Thus, no objects change state. Instead, functions can return data that contains immutable state. In unit tests, you can verify that return values are as expected. Functional design is intrinsically testable; we can consider it a kind of state-based testing, although the states you'd be verifying are immutable return values.

In this article series, you'll see three different styles of testing, from interaction-based testing with Mocks and Stubs in C#, over strictly functional state-based testing in Haskell, to pragmatic state-based testing in F#, finally looping back to C# to apply the lessons from functional programming.

• An example of interaction-based testing in C#
• An example of state-based testing in Haskell
• An example of state based-testing in F#
• An example of state-based testing in C#
• A pure Test Spy

Summary #

Adopting a more functional design, even in a fundamentally object-oriented language like C# can, in my experience, lead to a more sustainable code base. Various maintenance tasks become easier, including unit tests. Functional programming, however, is no panacea. My intent with this article series is only to inspire; to show alternatives to the ways things are normally done. Adopting one of those alternatives could lead to better code, but you must still exercise context-specific judgement.

Next: An example of interaction-based testing in C#.

How to combine asynchronous programming with Dependency Injection without leaky abstractions.

C# has decent support for asynchronous programming, but it ultimately leads to leaky abstractions. This is often conspicuous when combined with Dependency Injection (DI). This leads to frequently asked questions around the combination of DI and asynchronous programming. This article outlines the problem and suggests an alternative.

The code base supporting this article is available on GitHub.

A synchronous example #

In this article, you'll see various stages of a small sample code base that pretends to implement the server-side behaviour of an on-line restaurant reservation system (my favourite example scenario). In the first stage, the code uses DI, but no asynchronous I/O.

At the boundary of the application, a Post method receives a Reservation object:

public class ReservationsController : ControllerBase
{
    public ReservationsController(IMaîtreD maîtreD)
    {
        MaîtreD = maîtreD;
    }
 
    public IMaîtreD MaîtreD { get; }
 
    public IActionResult Post(Reservation reservation)
    {
        int? id = MaîtreD.TryAccept(reservation);
        if (id == null)
            return InternalServerError("Table unavailable");
 
        return Ok(id.Value);
    }
}

The Reservation object is just a simple bundle of properties:

public class Reservation
{
    public DateTimeOffset Date { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Quantity { get; set; }
    public bool IsAccepted { get; set; }
}

In a production code base, I'd favour a separation of DTOs and domain objects with proper encapsulation, but in order to keep the code example simple, here the two roles are combined.

The Post method simply delegates most work to an injected IMaîtreD object, and translates the return value to an HTTP response.

The code example is overly simplistic, to the point where you may wonder what is the point of DI, since it seems that the Post method doesn't perform any work itself. A slightly more realistic example includes some input validation and mapping between layers.

The IMaîtreD implementation is this:

public class MaîtreD : IMaîtreD
{
    public MaîtreD(int capacity, IReservationsRepository repository)
    {
        Capacity = capacity;
        Repository = repository;
    }
 
    public int Capacity { get; }
    public IReservationsRepository Repository { get; }
 
    public int? TryAccept(Reservation reservation)
    {
        var reservations = Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
        int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);
 
        if (Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
            return null;
 
        reservation.IsAccepted = true;
        return Repository.Create(reservation);
    }
}

The protocol for the TryAccept method is that it returns the reservation ID if it accepts the reservation. If the restaurant has too little remaining Capacity for the requested date, it instead returns null. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm no fan of null, but this keeps the example realistic. I'm also no fan of state mutation, but the example does that as well, by setting IsAccepted to true.

Introducing asynchrony #

The above example is entirely synchronous, but perhaps you wish to introduce some asynchrony. For example, the IReservationsRepository implies synchrony:

public interface IReservationsRepository
{
    Reservation[] ReadReservations(DateTimeOffset date);
 
    int Create(Reservation reservation);
}

In reality, though, you know that the implementation of this interface queries and writes to a relational database. Perhaps making this communication asynchronous could improve application performance. It's worth a try, at least.

How do you make something asynchronous in C#? You change the return type of the methods in question. Therefore, you have to change the IReservationsRepository interface:

public interface IReservationsRepository
{
    Task<Reservation[]> ReadReservations(DateTimeOffset date);
 
    Task<int> Create(Reservation reservation);
}

The Repository methods now return Tasks. This is the first leaky abstraction. From the Dependency Inversion Principle it follows that

"clients [...] own the abstract interfaces"

The change of the interface has nothing to with what MaîtreD needs, but rather with a particular implementation of the IReservationsRepository interface. Because this implementation queries and writes to a relational database, this implementation detail leaks into the interface definition. It is, therefore, a leaky abstraction.

On a more practical level, accommodating the change is easily done. Just add async and await keywords in appropriate places:

public async Task<int?> TryAccept(Reservation reservation)
{
    var reservations =
        await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
    int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);
 
    if (Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
        return null;
 
    reservation.IsAccepted = true;
    return await Repository.Create(reservation);
}

In order to compile, however, you also have to fix the IMaîtreD interface:

public interface IMaîtreD
{
    Task<int?> TryAccept(Reservation reservation);
}

This is the second leaky abstraction, and it's worse than the first. Perhaps you could successfully argue that it was conceptually acceptable to model IReservationsRepository as asynchronous. After all, a Repository conceptually represents a data store, and these are generally out-of-process resources that require I/O.

The IMaîtreD interface, on the other hand, is a domain object. It models how business is done, not how data should be accessed. Why should business logic be asynchronous?

It's hardly news that async and await is infectious. Once you introduce Tasks, it's async all the way!

That doesn't mean that asynchrony isn't one big leaky abstraction. It is.

You've probably already realised what this means in the context of the little example. You must also patch the Post method:

public async Task<IActionResult> Post(Reservation reservation)
{
    int? id = await MaîtreD.TryAccept(reservation);
    if (id == null)
        return InternalServerError("Table unavailable");
 
    return Ok(id.Value);
}

Pragmatically, I'd be ready to accept the argument that this isn't a big deal. After all, you just replace all return values with Tasks, and add async and await keywords where they need to go. This hardly impacts the maintainability of a code base.

In C#, I'd be inclined to just acknowledge that, hey, there's a leaky abstraction. Moving on...

On the other hand, sometimes people imply that it has to be like this. That there is no other way.

Falsifiable claims like that often get my attention. Oh, really?!

Move impure interactions to the boundary of the system #

We can pretend that Task<T> forms a functor. It's also a monad. Monads are those incredibly useful programming abstractions that have been propagating from their origin in statically typed functional programming languages to more mainstream languages like C#.

In functional programming, impure interactions happen at the boundary of the system. Taking inspiration from functional programming, you can move the impure interactions to the boundary of the system.

In the interest of keeping the example simple, I'll only move the impure operations one level out: from MaîtreD to ReservationsController. The approach can be generalised, although you may have to look into how to handle pure interactions.

Where are the impure interactions in MaîtreD? They are in the two interactions with IReservationsRepository. The ReadReservations method is non-deterministic, because the same input value can return different results, depending on the state of the database when you call it. The Create method causes a side effect to happen, because it creates a row in the database. This is one way in which the state of the database could change, which makes ReadReservations non-deterministic. Additionally, Create also violates Command Query Separation (CQS) by returning the ID of the row it creates. This, again, is non-deterministic, because the same input value will produce a new return value every time the method is called. (Incidentally, you should design Create methods so that they don't violate CQS.)

Move reservations to a method argument #

The first refactoring is the easiest. Move the ReadReservations method call to the application boundary. In the above state of the code, the TryAccept method unconditionally calls Repository.ReadReservations to populate the reservations variable. Instead of doing this from within TryAccept, just pass reservations as a method argument:

public async Task<int?> TryAccept(
    Reservation[] reservations,
    Reservation reservation)
{
    int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);
 
    if (Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
        return null;
 
    reservation.IsAccepted = true;
    return await Repository.Create(reservation);
}

This no longer compiles until you also change the IMaîtreD interface:

public interface IMaîtreD
{
    Task<int?> TryAccept(Reservation[] reservations, Reservation reservation);
}

You probably think that this is a much worse leaky abstraction than returning a Task. I'd be inclined to agree, but trust me: ultimately, this will matter not at all.

When you move an impure operation outwards, it means that when you remove it from one place, you must add it to another. In this case, you'll have to query the Repository from the ReservationsController, which also means that you need to add the Repository as a dependency there:

public class ReservationsController : ControllerBase
{
    public ReservationsController(
        IMaîtreD maîtreD,
        IReservationsRepository repository)
    {
        MaîtreD = maîtreD;
        Repository = repository;
    }
 
    public IMaîtreD MaîtreD { get; }
    public IReservationsRepository Repository { get; }
 
    public async Task<IActionResult> Post(Reservation reservation)
    {
        var reservations =
            await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
        int? id = await MaîtreD.TryAccept(reservations, reservation);
        if (id == null)
            return InternalServerError("Table unavailable");
 
        return Ok(id.Value);
    }
}

This is a refactoring in the true sense of the word. It just reorganises the code without changing the overall behaviour of the system. Now the Post method has to query the Repository before it can delegate the business decision to MaîtreD.

Separate decision from effect #

As far as I can tell, the main reason to use DI is because some impure interactions are conditional. This is also the case for the TryAccept method. Only if there's sufficient remaining capacity does it call Repository.Create. If it detects that there's too little remaining capacity, it immediately returns null and doesn't call Repository.Create.

In object-oriented code, DI is the most common way to decouple decisions from effects. Imperative code reaches a decision and calls a method on an object based on that decision. The effect of calling the method can vary because of polymorphism.

In functional programming, you typically use a functor like Maybe or Either to separate decisions from effects. You can do the same here.

The protocol of the TryAccept method already communicates the decision reached by the method. An int value is the reservation ID; this implies that the reservation was accepted. On the other hand, null indicates that the reservation was declined.

You can use the same sort of protocol, but instead of returning a Nullable<int>, you can return a Maybe<Reservation>:

public async Task<Maybe<Reservation>> TryAccept(
    Reservation[] reservations,
    Reservation reservation)
{
    int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);
 
    if (Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
        return Maybe.Empty<Reservation>();
 
    reservation.IsAccepted = true;
    return reservation.ToMaybe();
}

This completely decouples the decision from the effect. By returning Maybe<Reservation>, the TryAccept method communicates the decision it made, while leaving further processing entirely up to the caller.

In this case, the caller is the Post method, which can now compose the result of invoking TryAccept with Repository.Create:

public async Task<IActionResult> Post(Reservation reservation)
{
    var reservations =
        await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
    Maybe<Reservation> m =
        await MaîtreD.TryAccept(reservations, reservation);
    return await m
        .Select(async r => await Repository.Create(r))
        .Match(
            nothing: Task.FromResult(InternalServerError("Table unavailable")),
            just: async id => Ok(await id));
}

Notice that the Post method never attempts to extract 'the value' from m. Instead, it injects the desired behaviour (Repository.Create) into the monad. The result of calling Select with an asynchronous lambda expression like that is a Maybe<Task<int>>, which is a awkward combination. You can fix that later.

The Match method is the catamorphism for Maybe. It looks exactly like the Match method on the Church-encoded Maybe. It handles both the case when m is empty, and the case when m is populated. In both cases, it returns a Task<IActionResult>.

Synchronous domain logic #

At this point, you have a compiler warning in your code:

Warning CS1998 This async method lacks 'await' operators and will run synchronously. Consider using the 'await' operator to await non-blocking API calls, or 'await Task.Run(...)' to do CPU-bound work on a background thread.

public Maybe<Reservation> TryAccept(
    Reservation[] reservations,
    Reservation reservation)
{
    int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);
 
    if (Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
        return Maybe.Empty<Reservation>();
 
    reservation.IsAccepted = true;
    return reservation.ToMaybe();
}

This requires a minimal change to the Post method: it no longer has to await TryAccept:

public async Task<IActionResult> Post(Reservation reservation)
{
    var reservations =
        await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
    Maybe<Reservation> m = MaîtreD.TryAccept(reservations, reservation);
    return await m
        .Select(async r => await Repository.Create(r))
        .Match(
            nothing: Task.FromResult(InternalServerError("Table unavailable")),
            just: async id => Ok(await id));
}

Apart from that, this version of Post is the same as the one above.

Notice that at this point, the domain logic (TryAccept) is no longer asynchronous. The leaky abstraction is gone.

Redundant abstraction #

The overall work is done, but there's some tidying up remaining. If you review the TryAccept method, you'll notice that it no longer uses the injected Repository. You might as well simplify the class by removing the dependency:

public class MaîtreD : IMaîtreD
{
    public MaîtreD(int capacity)
    {
        Capacity = capacity;
    }
 
    public int Capacity { get; }
 
    public Maybe<Reservation> TryAccept(
        Reservation[] reservations,
        Reservation reservation)
    {
        int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);
 
        if (Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
            return Maybe.Empty<Reservation>();
 
        reservation.IsAccepted = true;
        return reservation.ToMaybe();
    }
}

The TryAccept method is now deterministic. The same input will always return the same input. This is not yet a pure function, because it still has a single side effect: it mutates the state of reservation by setting IsAccepted to true. You could, however, without too much trouble refactor Reservation to an immutable Value Object.

This would enable you to write the last part of the TryAccept method like this:

return reservation.Accept().ToMaybe();

In any case, the method is close enough to be pure that it's testable. The interactions of TryAccept and any client code (including unit tests) is completely controllable and observable by the client.

This means that there's no reason to Stub it out. You might as well just use the function directly in the Post method:

public class ReservationsController : ControllerBase
{
    public ReservationsController(
        int capacity,
        IReservationsRepository repository)
    {
        Capacity = capacity;
        Repository = repository;
    }
 
    public int Capacity { get; }
    public IReservationsRepository Repository { get; }
 
    public async Task<IActionResult> Post(Reservation reservation)
    {
        var reservations =
            await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
        Maybe<Reservation> m =
            new MaîtreD(Capacity).TryAccept(reservations, reservation);
        return await m
            .Select(async r => await Repository.Create(r))
            .Match(
                nothing: Task.FromResult(InternalServerError("Table unavailable")),
                just: async id => Ok(await id));
    }
}

Notice that ReservationsController no longer has an IMaîtreD dependency.

All this time, whenever you make a change to the TryAccept method signature, you'd also have to fix the IMaîtreD interface to make the code compile. If you worried that all of these changes were leaky abstractions, you'll be happy to learn that in the end, it doesn't even matter. No code uses that interface, so you can delete it.

Grooming #

The MaîtreD class looks fine, but the Post method could use some grooming. I'm not going to tire you with all the small refactoring steps. You can follow them in the GitHub repository if you're interested. Eventually, you could arrive at an implementation like this:

public class ReservationsController : ControllerBase
{
    public ReservationsController(
        int capacity,
        IReservationsRepository repository)
    {
        Capacity = capacity;
        Repository = repository;
        maîtreD = new MaîtreD(capacity);
    }
 
    public int Capacity { get; }
    public IReservationsRepository Repository { get; }
 
    private readonly MaîtreD maîtreD;
 
    public async Task<IActionResult> Post(Reservation reservation)
    {
        return await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date)
            .Select(rs => maîtreD.TryAccept(rs, reservation))
            .SelectMany(m => m.Traverse(Repository.Create))
            .Match(InternalServerError("Table unavailable"), Ok);
    }
}

Now the Post method is just a single, composed asynchronous pipeline. Is it a coincidence that this is possible?

This is no coincidence. This top-level method executes in the 'Task monad', and a monad is, by definition, composable. You can chain operations together, and they don't all have to be asynchronous. Specifically, maîtreD.TryAccept is a synchronous piece of business logic. It's unaware that it's being injected into an asynchronous context. This type of design would be completely run of the mill in F# with its asynchronous workflows.

Summary #

Dependency Injection frequently involves I/O-bound operations. Those typically get hidden behind interfaces so that they can be mocked or stubbed. You may want to access those I/O-bound resources asynchronously, but with C#'s support for asynchronous programming, you'll have to make your abstractions asynchronous.

When you make the leaf nodes in your call graph asynchronous, that design change ripples through the entire code base, forcing you to be async all the way. One result of this is that the domain model must also accommodate asynchrony, although this is rarely required by the logic it implements. These concessions to asynchrony are leaky abstractions.

Pragmatically, it's hardly a big problem. You can use the async and await keywords to deal with the asynchrony, and it's unlikely to, in itself, cause a problem with maintenance.

In functional programming, monads can address asynchrony without introducing sweeping leaky abstractions. Instead of making DI asynchronous, you can inject desired behaviour into an asynchronous context.

Behaviour Injection, not Dependency Injection.

Comments

public async Task<int?> TryAccept(Reservation reservation)
{
	if(await CheckTableAvailability(reservation))
	{
		reservation.IsAccepted = true;
		return await Repository.Create(reservation);
	}
	else
	{
		return null;
	}
}

private async Task<bool> CheckTableAvailability(Reservation reservation)
{
	var reservations = await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
	int reservedSeats = reservations.Sum(r => r.Quantity);

	if(Capacity < reservedSeats + reservation.Quantity)
	{
		foreach(var r in reservations)
		{
			if(!(await Telephone.AskConfirmation(r.Guest.PhoneNumber)))
			{
				//some guest cannot make it for his reservation
				return true;
			}
		}

		//all guests have confirmed their reservation - no table for us
		return false;
	}
	
	return true;
}
			

public class ReservationsController : ControllerBase
{
	private readonly MaitreD _maitreD;

	public ReservationsController(int capacity, IReservationsRepository repository, ITelephone telephone)
	{
		_maitreD = new MaitreD(capacity);
		Repository = repository;
		Telephone = telephone;
	}

	public IReservationsRepository Repository { get; }
	public ITelephone Telephone { get; }

	public async Task Post(Reservation reservation)
	{
		Reservation[] currentReservations = await Repository.ReadReservations(reservation.Date);
		var confirmationCalls = currentReservations.Select(cr => Telephone.AskConfirmation(cr.Guest.PhoneNumber));

		return _maitreD.CheckTableAvailability(currentReservations, reservation)
			.Match(
				some: r => new Maybe(r),
				none: _maitreD.AskConfirmation(await Task.WhenAll(confirmationCalls), reservation)
			)
			.Match(
				some: r => Ok(Repository.Create(_maitreD.Accept(r))),
				none: new ContentResult { Content = "Table unavailable", StatusCode = StatusCodes.Status500InternalServerError } as ActionResult
			);
	}
}
			

public ReservationsController(
    IReservationsRepository repository,
    TimeOfDay opensAt,
    TimeOfDay lastSeating,
    TimeSpan seatingDuration,
    IEnumerable<Table> tables)
{
    Repository = repository;
    MaitreD = new MaitreD(opensAt, lastSeating, seatingDuration, tables);
}

public ReservationsController(
    IReservationsRepository repository,
    MaitreD maitreD)
{
    Repository = repository;
    MaitreD = maitreD;
}

How do I get the value out of my monad? You don't. You inject the desired behaviour into the monad.

A frequently asked question about monads can be paraphrased as: How do I get the value out of my monad? This seems to particularly come up when the monad in question is Haskell's IO monad, from which you can't extract the value. This is by design, but then beginners are often stumped on how to write the code they have in mind.

You can encounter variations of the question, or at least the underlying conceptual misunderstanding, with other monads. This seems to be particularly prevalent when object-oriented or procedural programmers start working with Maybe or Either. People really want to extract 'the value' from those monads as well, despite the lack of guarantee that there will be a value.

So how do you extract the value from a monad?

The answer isn't use a comonad, although it could be, for a limited set of monads. Rather, the answer is mu.

Unit containers #

Before I attempt to address how to work with monads, I think it's worthwhile to speculate on what misleads people into thinking that it makes sense to even contemplate extracting 'the value' from a monad. After all, you rarely encounter the question: How do I get the value out of my collection?

Various collections form monads, but everyone intuitively understand that there isn't a single value in a collection. Collections could be empty, or contain many elements. Collections could easily be the most ordinary monad. Programmers deal with collections all the time.

Yet, I think that most programmers don't realise that collections form monads. The reason for this could be that mainstream languages rarely makes this relationship explicit. Even C# query syntax, which is nothing but monads in disguise, hides this fact.

What happens, I think, is that when programmers first come across monads, they often encounter one of a few unit containers.

What's a unit container? I admit that the word is one I made up, because I couldn't detect existing terminology on this topic. The idea, though, is that it's a functor guaranteed to contain exactly one value. Since functors are containers, I call such types unit containers. Examples include Identity, Lazy, and asynchronous functors.

You can extract 'the value' from most unit containers (with IO being the notable exception from the rule). Trivially, you can get the item contained in an Identity container:

> Identity<string> x = new Identity<string>("bar");
> x.Item
"bar"

Likewise, you can extract the value from lazy and asynchronous values:

> Lazy<int> x = new Lazy<int>(() => 42);
> x.Value
42

> Task<int> y = Task.Run(() => 1337);
> await y
1337

My theory, then, is that some programmers are introduced to the concept of monads via lazy or asynchronous computations, and that this could establish incorrect mental models.

Semi-containers #

There's another category of monad that we could call semi-containers (again, I'm open to suggestions for a better name). These are data containers that contain either a single value, or no value. In this set of monads, we find Nullable<T>, Maybe, and Either.

Unfortunately, Maybe implementations often come with an API that enables you to ask a Maybe object if it's populated or empty, and a way to extract the value from the Maybe container. This misleads many programmers to write code like this:

Maybe<int> id = // ...
if (id.HasItem)
    return new Customer(id.Item);
else
    throw new DontKnowWhatToDoException();

Granted, in many cases, people do something more reasonable than throwing a useless exception. In a specific context, it may be clear what to do with an empty Maybe object, but there are problems with this Tester-Doer approach:

• It doesn't compose.
• There's no systematic technique to apply. You always need to handle empty objects in a context-specific way.

If you throw an exception when the object is empty, you'll likely have to deal with that exception further up in the call stack.

If you return a magic value (like returning -1 when a natural number is expected), you again force all callers to check for that magic number.

If you set a flag that indicates that an object was empty, again, you put the burden on callers to check for the flag.

This leads to defensive coding, which, at best, makes the code unreadable.

Behaviour Injection #

Interestingly, programmers rarely take a Tester-Doer approach to working with collections. Instead, they rely on APIs for collections and arrays.

In C#, LINQ has been around since 2007, and most programmers love it. It's common knowledge that you can use the Select method to, for example, convert an array of numbers to an array of strings:

> new[] { 42, 1337, 2112, 90125 }.Select(i => i.ToString())
string[4] { "42", "1337", "2112", "90125" }

You can do that with all functors, including Maybe:

Maybe<int> id = // ...
Maybe<Customer> c = id.Select(x => new Customer(x));

A previous article offers a slightly more compelling example:

var viewModel = repository.Read(id).Select(r => r.ToViewModel());

Common to all the three above examples is that instead of trying to extract a value from the monad (which makes no sense in the array example), you inject the desired behaviour into the context of the data container. What that eventually brings about depends on the monad in question.

In the array example, the behaviour being injected is that of turning a number into a string. Since this behaviour is injected into a collection, it's applied to every element in the source array.

In the second example, the behaviour being injected is that of turning an integer into a Customer object. Since this behaviour is injected into a Maybe, it's only applied if the source object is populated.

In the third example, the behaviour being injected is that of turning a Reservation domain object into a View Model. Again, this only happens if the original Maybe object is populated.

Composability #

The marvellous quality of a monad is that it's composable. You could, for example, start by attempting to parse a string into a number:

string candidate = // Some string from application boundary
Maybe<int> idm = TryParseInt(candidate);

This code could be defined in a part of your code base that deals with user input. Instead of trying to get 'the value' out of idm, you can pass the entire object to other parts of the code. The next step, defined in a different method, in a different class, perhaps even in a different library, then queries a database to read a Reservation object corresponding to that ID - if the ID is there, that is:

Maybe<Reservation> rm = idm.SelectMany(repository.Read);

The Read method on the repository has this signature:

public Maybe<Reservation> Read(int id)

The Read method returns a Maybe<Reservation> object because you could pass any int to the method, but there may not be a row in the database that corresponds to that number. Had you used Select on idm, the return type would have been Maybe<Maybe<Reservation>>. This is a typical example of a nested functor, so instead, you use SelectMany, which flattens the functor. You can do this because Maybe is a monad.

The result at this stage is a Maybe<Reservation> object. If all goes according to plan, it's populated with a Reservation object from the database. Two things could go wrong at this stage, though:

1. The candidate string didn't represent a number.
2. The database didn't contain a row for the parsed ID.

You can now pass rm to another part of the code base, which then performs this step:

Maybe<ReservationViewModel> vm = rm.Select(r => r.ToViewModel());

Functors and monads are composable (i.e. 'chainable'). This is a fundamental trait of functors; they're (endo)morphisms, which, by definition, are composable. In order to leverage that composability, though, you must retain the monad. If you extract 'the value' from the monad, composability is lost.

For that reason, you're not supposed to 'get the value out of the monad'. Instead, you inject the desired behaviour into the monad in question, so that it stays composable. In the above example, repository.Read and r.ToViewModel() are behaviors injected into the Maybe monad.

Summary #

When we learn something new, there's always a phase where we struggle to understand a new concept. Sometimes, we may, inadvertently, erect a tentative, but misleading mental model of a concept. It seems to me that this happens to many people while they're grappling with the concept of functors and monads.

One common mental wrong turn that many people seem to take is to try to 'get the value out of the monad'. This seems to be particularly common with IO in Haskell, where the issue is a frequently asked question.

I've also reviewed enough F# code to have noticed that people often take the imperative, Tester-Doer road to 'a option. That's the reason this article uses a majority of its space on various Maybe examples.

In a future article, I'll show a more complete and compelling example of behaviour injection.

Comments

if(latitude.HasValue && longitude.HasValue)
Bearing = CalculateRhumbBearing(latitude.Value, longitude.Value, fixedLatitude, fixedLongitude).ToOptionMonad();
else
Bearing = OptionMonad<double>.None;

foreach(var item in values)
{
  if(item.HasValue)
  {
    yield return item.Value;
  }
}

Bearing = latitude
    .SelectMany(lat => longitude
        .Select(lon =>
            CalculateRhumbBearing(lat, lon, fixedLatitude, fixedLongitude)));

Bearing =
    from lat in latitude
    from lon in longitude
    select CalculateRhumbBearing(lat, lon, fixedLatitude, fixedLongitude);

public static IEnumerable<T> Choose<T>(this IEnumerable<IMaybe<T>> source)
{
    return source.SelectMany(m => m.Match(new T[0], x => new[] { x }));
}

Task<ReservationWithMenuSuggestion> EnrichWithSpecialOfTheDayAsync(Reservation reservation)

How do you design better abstractions? A retrospective look on an old article for object-oriented programmers.

About a decade ago, I had already been doing test-driven development (TDD) and used Dependency Injection for many years, but I'd started to notice some patterns about software design. I'd noticed that interfaces aren't abstractions and that TDD isn't a design methodology. Sometimes, I'd arrive at interfaces that turned out to be good abstractions, but at other times, the interfaces I created seemed to serve no other purpose than enabling unit testing.

In 2010 I thought that I'd noticed some patterns for good abstractions, so I wrote an article called Towards better abstractions. I still consider it a decent attempt at communicating my findings, but I don't think that I succeeded. My thinking on the subject was still too immature, and I lacked a proper vocabulary.

While I had hoped that I would be able to elaborate on such observations, and perhaps turn them into heuristics, my efforts soon after petered out. I moved on to other things, and essentially gave up on this particular research programme. Years later, while trying to learn category theory, I suddenly realised that mathematical disciplines like category theory and abstract algebra could supply the vocabulary. After some further work, I started publishing a substantial and long-running article series called From design patterns to category theory. It goes beyond my initial attempt, but it finally enabled me to crystallise those older observations.

In this article, I'll revisit that old article, Towards better abstractions, and translate the vague terminology I used then, to the terminology presented in From design patterns to category theory.

The thrust of the old article is that if you can create a Composite or a Null Object from an interface, then it's likely to be a good abstraction. I still consider that a useful rule of thumb.

When can you create a Composite? When the abstraction gives rise to a monoid. When can you create a Null Object? When the abstraction gives rise to a monoid.

All the 'API shapes' I'd identified in Towards better abstractions form monoids.

Commands #

A Command seems to be universally identified by a method typically called Execute:

public void Execute()

From unit isomorphisms we know that methods with the void return type are isomorphic to (impure) functions that return unit, and that unit forms a monoid.

Furthermore, we know from function monoids that methods that return a monoid themselves form monoids. Therefore, Commands form monoids.

In early 2011 I'd already explicitly noticed that Commands are composable. Now I know the deeper reason for this: they're monoids.

Closure of operations #

In Domain-Driven Design, Eric Evans discusses the benefits of designing APIs that exhibit closure of operations. This means that a method returns the same type as all its input arguments. The simplest example is the one that I show in the old article:

public static T DoIt(T x)

That's just an endomorphism, which forms a monoid.

Another variation is a method that takes two arguments:

public static T DoIt(T x, T y)

This is a binary operation. While it's certainly a magma, in itself it's not guaranteed to be a monoid. In fact, Evans' colour-mixing example is only a magma, but not a monoid. You can, however, also view this as a special case of the reduction of input shape, below, where the 'extra' arguments just happen to have the same type as the return type. In that interpretation, such a method still forms a monoid, but it's not guaranteed to be meaningful. (Just like modulo 31 addition forms a monoid; it's hardly useful.)

The same sort of argument goes for methods with closure of operations, but more input arguments, like:

public static T DoIt(T x, T y, T z)

This sort of method is, however, rare, unless you're working in a stringly typed code base where methods look like this:

public static string DoIt(string x, string y, string z)

That's a different situation, though, because those strings should probably be turned into domain types that properly communicate their roles. Once you do that, you'll probably find that the method arguments have different types.

In any case, regardless of cardinality, you can view all methods with closure of operations as special cases of the reduction of input shape below.

Reduction of input #

This is the part of the original article where my struggles with vocabulary began in earnest. The situation is when you have a method that looks like this, perhaps as an interface method:

public interface IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>
{
    T1 DoIt(T1 x, T2 y, T3 z);
}

In order to stay true to the terminology of my original article, I've named this reduction of input generic example IInputReducer. The reason I originally called it reduction of input is that such a method takes a set of input types as arguments, but only returns a value of a type that's a subset of the set of input types. Thus, the method looks like it's reducing the range of input types to a single one of those types.

A realistic example could be a piece of HTTP middleware that defines an action filter as an interface that you can implement to intercept each HTTP request:

public interface IActionFilter
{
    Task<HttpResponseMessage> ExecuteActionFilterAsync(
        HttpActionContext actionContext,
        CancellationToken cancellationToken,
        Task<HttpResponseMessage> continuation);
}

This is a slightly modified version of an earlier version of the ASP.NET Web API. Notice that in this example, it's not the first argument's type that doubles as the return type, but rather the third and last argument. The reduction of input 'shape' can take an arbitrary number of arguments, and any of the argument types can double as a return type, regardless of position.

Returning to the generic IInputReducer example, you can easily make a Composite of it:

public class CompositeInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> : IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>
{
    private readonly IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>[] reducers;
 
    public CompositeInputReducer(params IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>[] reducers)
    {
        this.reducers = reducers;
    }
 
    public T1 DoIt(T1 x, T2 y, T3 z)
    {
        var acc = x;
        foreach (var reducer in reducers)
            acc = reducer.DoIt(acc, y, z);
        return acc;
    }
}

Notice that you call DoIt on all the composed reducers. The arguments that aren't part of the return type, y and z, are passed to each call to DoIt unmodified, whereas the T1 value x is only used to initialise the accumulator acc. Each call to DoIt also returns a T1 object, so the acc value is updated to that object, so that you can use it as an input for the next iteration.

This is an imperative implementation, but as you'll see below, you can also implement the same behaviour in a functional manner.

For the sake of argument, pretend that you reorder the method arguments so that the method looks like this:

T1 DoIt(T3 z, T2 y, T1 x);

From Uncurry isomorphisms you know that a method like that is isomorphic to a function with the type 'T3 -> 'T2 -> 'T1 -> 'T1 (F# syntax). You can think of such a curried function as a function that returns a function that returns a function: 'T3 -> ('T2 -> ('T1 -> 'T1)). The rightmost function 'T1 -> 'T1 is clearly an endomorphism, and you already know that an endomorphism gives rise to a monoid. Finally, Function monoids informs us that a function that returns a monoid itself forms a monoid, so 'T2 -> ('T1 -> 'T1) forms a monoid. This argument applies recursively, because if that's a monoid, then 'T3 -> ('T2 -> ('T1 -> 'T1)) is also a monoid.

What does that look like in C#?

In the rest of this article, I'll revert the DoIt method signature to T1 DoIt(T1 x, T2 y, T3 z);. The monoid implementation looks much like the endomorphism code. Start with a binary operation:

public static IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> Append<T1, T2, T3>(
    this IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> r1,
    IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> r2)
{
    return new AppendedReducer<T1, T2, T3>(r1, r2);
}
 
private class AppendedReducer<T1, T2, T3> : IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>
{
    private readonly IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> r1;
    private readonly IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> r2;
 
    public AppendedReducer(
        IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> r1,
        IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> r2)
    {
        this.r1 = r1;
        this.r2 = r2;
    }
 
    public T1 DoIt(T1 x, T2 y, T3 z)
    {
        return r2.DoIt(r1.DoIt(x, y, z), y, z);
    }
}

This is similar to the endomorphism Append implementation. When you combine two IInputReducer objects, you receive an AppendedReducer that implements DoIt by first calling DoIt on the first object, and then using the return value from that method call as the input for the second DoIt method call. Notice that y and z are just 'context' variables used for both reducers.

Just like the endomorphism, you can also implement the identity input reducer:

public class IdentityInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> : IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>
{
    public T1 DoIt(T1 x, T2 y, T3 z)
    {
        return x;
    }
}

This simply returns x while ignoring y and z. The Append method is associative, and the IdentityInputReducer is both left and right identity for the operation, so this is a monoid. Since monoids accumulate, you can also implement an Accumulate extension method:

public static IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> Accumulate<T1, T2, T3>(
    this IReadOnlyCollection<IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>> reducers)
{
    IInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> identity = new IdentityInputReducer<T1, T2, T3>();
    return reducers.Aggregate(identity, (acc, reducer) => acc.Append(reducer));
}

This implementation follows the overall implementation pattern for accumulating monoidal values: start with the identity and combine pairwise. While I usually show this in a more imperative form, I've here used a proper functional implementation for the method.

The IInputReducer object returned from that Accumulate function has exactly the same behaviour as the CompositeInputReducer.

The reduction of input shape forms another monoid, and is therefore composable. The Null Object is the IdentityInputReducer<T1, T2, T3> class. If you set T1 = T2 = T3, you have the closure of operations 'shapes' discussed above; they're just special cases, so form at least this type of monoid.

Composable return types #

The original article finally discusses methods that in themselves don't look composable, but turn out to be so anyway, because their return types are composable. Without knowing it, I'd figured out that methods that return monoids are themselves monoids.

In 2010 I didn't have the vocabulary to put this into specific language, but that's all it says.

Summary #

In 2010 I apparently discovered an ad-hoc, informally specified, vaguely glimpsed, half-understood description of half of abstract algebra.

Riffs on Greenspun's tenth rule aside, things clicked for me once I started to investigate what category theory was about, and why it seemed so closely linked to Haskell. That's one of the reasons I started writing the From design patterns to category theory article series.

The patterns I thought that I could see in 2010 all form monoids, but there are many other universal abstractions from mathematics that apply to programming as well.