[Kimchi-devel] Why do we use mockmodel?

Hi! After creating a few patches for Kimchi, it occurred to me that the mockmodel design has more cons than pros. So I started wondering why we still use it. I understand - and totally agree - that we should have an extensive test infrastructure to make sure the code runs as designed and to make it very easy to find regression bugs on every new feature we implement. And as Kimchi works very integrated to its host system, it may not be easy to create expected/failed situations for things we don't always have control. But for every new feature we implement, we currently have to: 1) Implement the feature itself 2) Create tests for (1) 3) Implement the feature in a mock environment 4) Create tests for (3) And by looking at some existing code, many of the mock tests don't actually test anything. They're just there so we can say we have a mock implementation and a test for it. Why create a mock function and a test for the mock function if what we need is to test the real code? And a lot of times, the mock implementation (and the tests) are just copy/paste of the original feature. For me, that seems very tedious and useless. Why don't we get rid of the mockmodel and keep only the "real" model? I understand that it's not so simple to remove it right away, that's why I'm starting this discussion so we could see how to do it better - if we're actually going to do it. What would we miss if we didn't have the mockmodel anymore? I believe we'll need to be more careful when writing tests which run on a real environment (i.e. we can't "leak" VMs, networks, templates, or anything else) but at least we'll always test real code and we won't be writing code that won't be used. Please share your opinion with us. Best regards, Crístian.