Static Methods are Death to Testability

by Miško Hevery

Recently many of you, after reading Guide to Testability, wrote to telling me there is nothing wrong with static methods. After all what can be easier to test than Math.abs()! And Math.abs() is static method! If abs() was on instance method, one would have to instantiate the object first, and that may prove to be a problem. (See how to think about the new operator, and class does real work)

The basic issue with static methods is they are procedural code. I have no idea how to unit-test procedural code. Unit-testing assumes that I can instantiate a piece of my application in isolation. During the instantiation I wire the dependencies with mocks/friendlies which replace the real dependencies. With procedural programing there is nothing to "wire" since there are no objects, the code and data are separate.

Here is another way of thinking about it. Unit-testing needs seams, seams is where we prevent the execution of normal code path and is how we achieve isolation of the class under test. seams work through polymorphism, we override/implement class/interface and than wire the class under test differently in order to take control of the execution flow. With static methods there is nothing to override. Yes, static methods are easy to call, but if the static method calls another static method there is no way to overrider the called method dependency.

Lets do a mental exercise. Suppose your application has nothing but static methods. (Yes, code like that is possible to write, it is called procedural programming.) Now imagine the call graph of that application. If you try to execute a leaf method, you will have no issue setting up its state, and asserting all of the corner cases. The reason is that a leaf method makes no further calls. As you move further away from the leaves and closer to the root main() method it will be harder and harder to set up the state in your test and harder to assert things. Many things will become impossible to assert. Your tests will get progressively larger. Once you reach the main() method you no longer have a unit-test (as your unit is the whole application) you now have a scenario test. Imagine that the application you are trying to test is a word processor. There is not much you can assert from the main method.

We have already covered that global state is bad and how it makes your application hard to understand. If your application has no global state than all of the input for your static method must come from its arguments. Chances are very good that you can move the method as an instance method to one of the method's arguments. (As in method(a,b) becomes a.method(b).) Once you move it you realized that that is where the method should have been to begin with. The use of static methods becomes even worse problem when the static methods start accessing the global state of the application. What about methods which take no arguments? Well, either methodX() returns a constant in which case there is nothing to test; it accesses global state, which is bad; or it is a factory.

Sometimes a static methods is a factory for other objects. This further exuberates the testing problem. In tests we rely on the fact that we can wire objects differently replacing important dependencies with mocks. Once a new operator is called we can not override the method with a sub-class. A caller of such a static factory is permanently bound to the concrete classes which the static factory method produced. In other words the damage of the static method is far beyond the static method itself. Butting object graph wiring and construction code into static method is extra bad, since object graph wiring is how we isolate things for testing.

"So leaf methods are ok to be static but other methods should not be?" I like to go a step further and simply say, static methods are not OK. The issue is that a methods starts off being a leaf and over time more and more code is added to them and they lose their positions as a leafs. It is way to easy to turn a leaf method into none-leaf method, the other way around is not so easy. Therefore a static leaf method is a slippery slope which is waiting to grow and become a problem. Static methods are procedural! In OO language stick to OO. And as far as Math.abs(-5) goes, I think Java got it wrong. I really want to write -5.abs(). Ruby got that one right.

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