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

Supplementing unit tests with integration tests

Unit tests are small, fast tests that verify the behavior of a single component. In Go, the UUT is typically the package, which exposes an API that these fast tests can verify against. These independent units combine to make up components, which are identifiable parts of a system. Usually, components have well-defined responsibilities and provide a group of related functions. A component’s units work together to deliver the component’s functionality.

Engineers rely heavily on unit tests in the development phase, and they are an important pillar of TDD, where the testing practice requires the testing code to be written together with the implementation code. However, they have some limitations that make the remaining tests of the testing pyramid essential. Therefore, as TDD practitioners, we cannot simply focus on unit tests.

Limitations of unit testing

The practice of verifying functionality with unit tests has...