How to avoid flakey tests in Golang unit tests?

How to avoid Flaky tests in Golang? Use go test -test.short to ignore tests marked as Flaky. Properly start and shut down servers/services required for testing. Use concurrency control mechanisms to prevent race conditions. Seed the random number generator to eliminate randomness. Use the Cleanup method and defer keyword to ensure resource cleanup. Use mocking and stubbing to avoid environment dependencies. Capture Flaky behavior with table-driven testing. Move the service into the test suite's Setup() method to avoid race conditions.

How to avoid Flaky tests in Golang unit tests?

Flaky testing refers to test cases with inconsistent or unpredictable test results. This is a serious problem for code stability and maintainability.

In Golang, there are several common reasons for Flaky testing:

• Race conditions
• Environment dependencies
• Randomness

Avoid Flaky tests

Here are some tips to avoid Flaky tests:

1. Use go test -test.short: All tests marked [Slow], [Serial], and [Flaky] are ignored at runtime.
2. Starting and shutting down servers or services required for testing: Ensure that servers/services are started correctly at the beginning of the test and that they are shut down correctly at the end of the test.
3. Use sync.Mutex or other concurrency control mechanisms: Prevent race conditions.
4. Set the seed when using a random number generator: Remove the effect of randomness.
5. Integration tests use the Cleanup method of *testing.T: Define cleanup code that runs at the end of the test to ensure that the test is set up correctly .
6. Close resources using the defer keyword: avoid resource leaks and ensure resources are released when a test fails.
7. Use mocking and stubbing: Avoid environment dependencies.
8. Use table-driven testing: Capture Flaky behavior by providing multiple test cases.

Practical case

Consider the following example test:

import "testing"

func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {
    service := StartService()
    defer service.Close()
    // ... 测试逻辑
}

This test is vulnerable to Flaky because StartService() may A race condition occurs in parallel testing. To avoid this, you can move the service into the test suite's Setup() method:

func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {
    setupTestSuite(t)
    // ... 测试逻辑
}

func setupTestSuite(t *testing.T) {
    t.Helper()
    service = StartService()
    t.Cleanup(func() {
        service.Close()
    })
}

With this approach, the service is started at the beginning of the test suite, and is Close at the end of the suite, thus avoiding race conditions.

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