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

Working with the testing package

The standard library provides the testing package, which contains the essentials we need for writing and running tests. In this section, we will explore how to use it and begin to apply it so that we can write tests for our simple terminal calculator example.

The testing package

The testing package provides support for testing Go code. It must be imported by all test code as this is the way to interact with the test runner. At a glance, the testing package seems very simplistic, but it fits with Go’s language design. Packages should be small, focused, and have a limited number of dependencies. This should make them easy to test with a relatively simple testing library.

Here are some of the important types from the testing library that we will be using:

  • testing.T: All tests must use this type to interact with the test runner. It contains a method for declaring failing tests, skipping tests, and running tests in parallel. We will...