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Sebastian Bergmann's Blog:
Testing Code That Uses Singletons
Feb 12, 2010 @ 17:28:45

Sebastian Bergmann has written up a post for his blog recently that looks at unit testing singletons, something that's been rumored as being some of the hardest to test.

I frequently quote Miško Hevery with "It is hard to test code that uses singletons." And then my audience asks me... Why is it hard to test code that uses singletons? Lets have a look at the default implementation of the Singleton design pattern in PHP.

He defines a singleton first, showing how it's used to create single instances of objects and, because of this, cannot be tested easily because there's no way to know you're getting a clean instance every time. Dependency injection can help with the problem by allowing you to pass in a "mock" instance of the singleton class each time. He also mentions some variations on singletons that could make it easier to test in the future.

tagged: singleton unittest technique dependency injection

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