My second project at Google basically killed mocking for me and I've basically never done it since

“The solution is to have dummy versions of services and interfaces that have minimal correct behavior” If you aren’t doing this with mocks then you’re doing mocks wrong.

Mockito, in every case I had to use it, was a last resort because a third party library didnt lend itself to mocking, or you were bringing legacy code under test and using it long enough to refactor it out. It should never be the first tool. But when you need it, it’s very useful.

I'm not sure I understand. "The solution is to have dummy versions of services and interfaces that have minimal correct behavior". That's mocks in a nutshell. What other way would you use mocks?

my time at google likewise led me to the conclusion that fakes were better than mocks in pretty much every case (though I was working in c++ and python, not java). edit: of course google was an unusual case because you had access to all the source code. I daresay there are cases where only a mock will work because you can't satisfy type signatures with a fake.

Heavy mocks usage comes from dogmatically following the flawed “most tests should be unit tests” prescription of the “testing pyramid,” as well as a strict adherence to not testing more than one class at a time. This necessitates heavy mocking, which is fragile, terrible to refactor, leads to lots of low-value tests. Sadly, AI these days will generate tons of those unit tests in the hands of those who don’t know better. All in all leading to the same false sense of security and killing development speed.

I dont use dummy services and I dont use mocking. I'm writing simulators to test things for HW or big services which are not available for testing. Simulators need to be complete for their use cases or they cannot be used for testing.