Go Test Engineering

Make Go tests trustworthy, strict, and maintainable. Optimize for their value as behavioral constraints — not for test count, coverage percentage, or a green go test ./... at any cost.

Principles

1. Correctness outranks pass rate.
2. Establish the intended contract before judging either the test or the implementation.
3. Fix or delete an incorrect, obsolete, duplicate, or meaningless test.
4. Fix production code when a sound test exposes an implementation defect.
5. Never weaken an assertion merely to accommodate current behavior.
6. Test observable behavior and owned contracts, not incidental implementation details.
7. Prefer the standard testing package and the smallest useful test design.
8. Never add a test solely to increase coverage.
9. Use a plain unit test whenever one can constrain the behavior. A golden test is admitted only when the output depends on an external process or environment (protoc, buf, wire, go generate, loaded packages) and its exact bytes are a reviewed contract.

Operating Mode