In my experience, if your tests require lots of mocks then that's a sign that IO is coupled too tightly to application logic. Refactoring your code so this isn't the case isn't always obvious, but it's a breath of fresh air and really cleans up the interfaces.
One problem with decoupling IO is that you still somehow need to get the data deep down into those places where it's needed by your application logic. That means you end up either:
1. Passing each individual little piece of data separately down the call stack with bloated method signatures containing laundry lists of data that seemingly have nothing to do with some of the contexts where they appear.
2. Combining pieces of data into larger state-holding types which you pass down the call stack, adding complexity to tests which now need mocks.
I think one of the toughest parts of day-to-day software engineering is dealing with this tension when you have complex modules that need to pass a lot of state around. It's easier and cleaner to pull stuff out of global state or thread contexts or IO, but that makes it harder to test. More often than I would like to admit, I ask myself whether a small change really needs an automated test, because those shiny tests that we adore so much sometimes complicate the real application code a lot.
If anyone has thoughts on how they approach this problem (which don't contain the words "dynamic scoping" :P) I'd love to read them.
This is my experience as well. I learned the lesson the one time I was allowed to write unit tests at work. It was on an existing code base without tests. I had to significantly refactor code to make it testable, and one of the lessons I learned from the experience is to isolate I/O from the main business logic that I'm testing.
In the pre-test code, the functions were littered with PrintConsole statements that would take a string and a warning level (the Console was an object that was responsible for printing strings on a HW console). I made sure my main business logic was never aware of the Console object. I made an intermediate/interface class that handled all I/O, and mocked that class. Instead, the function now had LogMessage, LogWarning, LogError functions of the interface class that took a string. The function had no idea where these messages could go - it could go to the console, it could be logged to a file, it could be sent as a text message. It didn't care.
Now when we needed to make changes to how things were printed, none of our business logic functions, nor their tests, were impacted. In this case at least, attempting to unit test led to less coupled code.
And usually with good tdd acceptance in your team people automatically write more testable code, because they're too lazy to write tightly coupled code that needs many mocks.
