I got asked the other day about whether it was OK to use stub_chain when testing what turned out to be a legacy fat_model class of over 500 lines. There wasn’t much to think about as I replied it was OK if there wasn’t a lot of time in the story for refactoring since the code was already legacy, but it wasn’t my favorite tool. Even the documentation notes:
we recommend treating usage of stub_chain as a code smell
It’s a part I appreciate about Spec. It’s an opinionated BDD framework, but it allows you do use it in a way that works for you. I don’t love stub_chain or even less as_null_object, but when diving deep into badly covered code they can be a nice way to open up a seam in the code and allow you to start a big refactoring.