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

Answers

  1. The testing pyramid specifies how automated test suites should be structured. At the bottom of the pyramid are unit tests, which test a single isolated component. Next up in the middle of the pyramid are integration tests, which test that multiple components are able to work together as specified. Finally, at the top of the test pyramid are end-to-end tests that test the behavior of the entire application.
  2. Functional tests cover the correctness of a system, while non-functional tests cover the usability and performance of a system. Both types of tests are required to ensure that the system satisfies the customers’ needs.
  3. The red, green, and refactor TDD approach refers to the three phases of the process. The red phase involves writing a new failing test for the functionality we intend to implement. The green phase involves writing enough implementation code to make all tests pass. Finally, the refactor phase involves optimizing both implementation and testing code to remove duplication and come up with better solutions.
  4. Acceptance test-driven development. Just like TDD, ATDD puts tests first. ATDD is related to TDD, but it involves writing a suite of acceptance tests before the implementation begins. It involves multiple stakeholders to ensure that the acceptance test captures the customer’s requirements.
  5. Code coverage is the percentage of your lines of code that are exercised by your unit test. This is calculated by considering the function statements, parameter values, and execution paths of your code. The Go test runner outputs the calculated code coverage. We should aim for a good value, but optimizing for 100% is normally not appropriate.