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

Issues with concurrency

Writing concurrent code in Go is elegant and simple. However, it does make our code more complex. Developers need to be familiar with the behavior of concurrency mechanisms to understand the code they are reading. Furthermore, as timing plays a crucial part in how goroutines behave, we might have a hard time reproducing potential bugs. In this section, we look at three common concurrency issues. As we deep dive into each example, we will also have the opportunity to understand the behavior of Go’s concurrency mechanisms.

Data races

A data race is the most common concurrency issue. This issue occurs when multiple goroutines access and modify the same shared resource concurrently. This is one of the reasons why we should avoid sharing the state between goroutines, preferring to share information between goroutines using channels.

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