Large Scale Unit Testing for Go Programming Language Packages

Testing in Go is reasonably easy compared to all other programming languages due to its out of the box tools availability and robustness. Moreover, there are many tutorials made available for beginners to learn and practice. When at scaled, such as growing beyond 1000 test cases, the existing test approaches introduced by the tutorials become too complicated, causing a huge refactoring efforts like 2-3 days overhauling efforts. Hence, there is a need for a new large scale test approach for unit testing Go packages. This paper first introduces Go programming language. Then, it proceeds to present the current trends related to Go testing practices and its approaches. After that, the paper presents all encountered problems while using the existing test approaches at scale. The root causes of the problems are identified and mitigation actions are determined. Lastly, the paper proposes a large scale test approach based on the learning and mitigation actions. The approach is then discussed and concluded.