Mocking and patching are powerful techniques for testing, but they can be easily abused, with negative effects on code quality, maintenance, and application architecture. These pain-points can be hard to verbalize, and consequently hard to address. If your unit tests are a PITA, but you cannot explain why, this talk may be for you. Mocking as a technique has deep roots within OOD and TDD, going back 20+ years, but many Python developers know mocks and patches merely as a technique to isolate …