Go Testing By Example

Posted on Tuesday, December 5, 2023.

I had the honor of opening GopherCon Australia in early November with my talk “Go Testing By Example”. While there were some technical difficulties during the live presentation, I took the time to re-record it at home and share it with you here.

In this talk, I shared 20 valuable tips for effective testing:

1. Make it easy to add new test cases.
2. Use test coverage to find untested code.
3. Coverage is no substitute for thought.
4. Write exhaustive tests.
5. Separate test cases from test logic.
6. Look for special cases.
7. If you didn’t add a test, you didn’t fix the bug.
8. Not everything fits in a table.
9. Test cases can be in testdata files.
10. Compare against other implementations.
11. Make test failures readable.
12. If the answer can change, write code to update them.
13. Use txtar for multi-file test cases.
14. Annotate existing formats to create testing mini-languages.
15. Write parsers and printers to simplify tests.
16. Code quality is limited by test quality.
17. Scripts make good tests.
18. Try rsc.io/script for your own script-based test cases.
19. Improve your tests over time.
20. Aim for continuous deployment.

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