After spending a couple days implementing test cases using Mock objects, I switched to testing using stubs, because I still needed to verify the functionality of the code.
It took me only a few hours to write the test cases I needed using stubs, and with and IDE it’s even easier. But I don’t think its a fair assessment to compare using Mocks to Stubs because each tool is used for a different purpose (behavioral vs. functional).
However, I did notice one very obvious disadvantage to using stubs; if your application is dynamic and the functionality is changing test cases become brittle quickly, and require you to add additional members or functions.
But I would still advocate using stubs in writing test cases, because of the simplicity involved in writing them, being able to abstract away or limit dependent classes.
