aeondave/golang-testing

Go Testing

This skill is about writing tests that are reliable, readable, and useful as documentation.

When to activate

• Writing new tests for functions, packages, or APIs
• Refactoring tests for clarity and reduced flakiness
• Adding benchmarks or fuzz tests
• Improving coverage without gaming the metric

Core rules (high signal)

• Prefer table-driven tests for coverage and readability.
• Use t.Helper() and t.Cleanup() to keep failures actionable.
• Tests should be deterministic: avoid time.Sleep() unless unavoidable.
• Prefer fakes (in-memory implementations) over heavy mocks.
• Use t.Parallel() only when the test is truly isolated.

Quick checklist for a review

• Setup is outside the assertion loop; minimal shared mutable state
• Subtests have meaningful names (t.Run("case", ...))
• Error messages show got/want and context
• External dependencies are explicit (DBs, network, time)
• Benchmarks report allocs when relevant (b.ReportAllocs())

Resources

Load on demand:

• references/unit-tests.md — TDD loop, table tests, subtests, parallel subtests
• references/helpers-fixtures.md — helpers, TempDir, Cleanup, testdata, golden files
• references/mocking-fakes.md — interfaces for dependencies, fakes vs mocks, examples
• references/http-testing.md — httptest patterns and JSON assertions
• references/bench-fuzz.md — benchmarks and fuzzing best practices
• references/coverage-ci.md — cover profiles, coverpkg notes, CI integration cautions
• references/commands.md — go test command recipes (race, timeout, count, patterns)