Nothing is sacrosanct

There is an interesting bug opened against Kafka. For those of you too lazy to click on the link and read through the description, I am reproducing it here in full.

It appears that validation of configuration properties is performed in the ConsumerConfig and ProducerConfig constructors. This is generally bad practice as it couples object construction and validation. It also makes it difficult to mock these objects in unit tests.

Ideally validation of the configuration properties should be separated from object construction and initiated by those that rely/use these config objects.

http://misko.hevery.com/code-reviewers-guide/flaw-constructor-does-real-work/

It links to an article by Misko Hevery on writing testable code. If you have not read posts by Misko Hevery, I urge you to. For an open source project like Kafka, it might make sense(Jay Kreps, the person behind Kafka does not agree with the bug as visible in the comment) to follow all the guidelines of writing testable code but for your project it might not. If you are a small company with a two or three person team, do not blindly follow practices because someone on the internet says so.

Follow rules and guidelines only if it helps you to make your code more secure, performant, easier to maintain etc, do not ape guidelines without understanding why they are laid out in the first place. To go back in history, checked exceptions were all the rage in the Java land a couple of years ago, but these days, after frameworks like Spring sprang up, people look down upon checked exceptions. Same with TDD. TDD was expounded as the next best thing after sliced bread, but now programmers are raising their doubts about TDD.

A lot of times, mocking objects, interfaces etc takes more work than writing the actual functionality. In many projects, there might not be an ROI in writing/maintaining this elaborate test framework/infrastructure. It is true that injecting dependencies into an object makes it easier to test, but it also comes with the downside of having to take care of injecting dependencies every time you create that object. If you are injecting dependencies by hand, object creation becomes an elaborate exercise each time, else you have to delegate this to some framework like Spring, Guice etc, now your project is bloated. Maybe you should side step dependency injection and create the object with the dependencies inside it.

The situations and background under which these rules/guidelines crop up might be radically different than the one in your organisation/team. Taking the call of what to follow and what not to is more of an art than science. Your instincts, past experiences etc help you in formulating them.