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

Chapter 4, Building Efficient Test Suites

  1. An edge case is a test case that occurs at extreme values of an operating parameter. A corner case occurs at the extreme values of multiple operating parameters. As corner cases occur when multiple edge cases occur, they are much less likely to occur than edge cases.
  2. An idempotent operation is an operation that can be repeated multiple times without changing the initial result. These operations are predominant in API design, which can often involve retries and resending requests due to network conditions.
  3. In Go, error handling is done using the built-in error type. Errors are handled as part of regular code flow, where errors are handled just like any other return value, most often alongside other values using multiple return values.
  4. Table-driven testing is a popular technique that allows us to test multiple scenarios in a unified way, which reduces code duplication. Custom types are created, which represent the inputs and...