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 unit under test

In Chapter 1, Getting to Grips with Test-Driven Development, we discussed the structure of tests using the Arrange-Act-Assert (AAA) pattern. We also briefly mentioned that the Arrange step sets up the Unit Under Test (UUT) and its dependencies. The test then exercises and verifies the functionality of the UUT.

In Go, source code is organized into packages and modules. We will begin by exploring what these are and how they work and then look at how test files fit into this structure. A solid understanding of the power of packages will set the scene for us to begin considering not only how to write tests, but what to test.

Modules and packages

If you have worked with Go for a while, you might be familiar with Go’s module system, which was introduced as the default dependency management solution in Go 1.13. The latest Go version at the time of writing is version 1.19, so the module system has been the standard solution for some time.

Modules

A...