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

The Go race detector

In Chapter 8, Testing Microservice Architectures, we explored how to use the pprof tool to profile the CPU and memory usage of Go applications. One of the essential tools that can help us find issues with concurrency is the Go race detector. It is a powerful tool that analyzes our code to find concurrency problems when an application is running.

Go’s race detector was added to the toolchain in Go 1.1, released in 2012. This tool was designed to help developers find race conditions in their code. As we have seen in the previous examples, writing concurrent code in Go is easy, but bugs can appear in even the most readable and well-designed code.

The race detector is enabled using the –race command-line flag, alongside the go command. For example, we can instruct it to run alongside our program:

$ go run –race main.go

The race detector can be used with other commands as well, including the build and test commands. This makes it easy...