Book Image

Test-Driven Development in Go

By : Adelina Simion
Book Image

Test-Driven Development in Go

By: Adelina Simion

Overview of this book

Experienced developers understand the importance of designing a comprehensive testing strategy to ensure efficient shipping and maintaining services in production. This book shows you how to utilize test-driven development (TDD), a widely adopted industry practice, for testing your Go apps at different levels. You’ll also explore challenges faced in testing concurrent code, and learn how to leverage generics and write fuzz tests. The book begins by teaching you how to use TDD to tackle various problems, from simple mathematical functions to web apps. You’ll then learn how to structure and run your unit tests using Go’s standard testing library, and explore two popular testing frameworks, Testify and Ginkgo. You’ll also implement test suites using table-driven testing, a popular Go technique. As you advance, you’ll write and run behavior-driven development (BDD) tests using Ginkgo and Godog. Finally, you’ll explore the tricky aspects of implementing and testing TDD in production, such as refactoring your code and testing microservices architecture with contract testing implemented with Pact. All these techniques will be demonstrated using an example REST API, as well as smaller bespoke code examples. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to design and implement a comprehensive testing strategy for your Go applications and microservices architecture.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Big Picture
6
Part 2: Integration and End-to-End Testing with TDD
11
Part 3: Advanced Testing Techniques

Concurrency mechanisms in Go

Go’s in-built concurrency mechanisms are one of its biggest strengths and are often one of the main reasons developers choose to use Go for their services. Implementing concurrency in Go is easy (and painless!) due to its goroutines and channels. In this section, we will explore each mechanism and review its behavior so that we can better understand how to use and test them.

Concurrency is a program’s ability to process multiple tasks at the same time. This crucial ability allows us to get the most out of the CPU processing power, allowing us to make optimal use of our resources. This is important in all systems in order to be able to process as many requests as possible, without disrupting other flows in the program and keep computing costs low.

Figure 9.1 depicts two concurrent tasks:

Figure 9.1 – Concurrent execution flow of two tasks

The tasks are divided into functions that form a call stack:

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