I was just talking with a recruiter looking for a QA engineer with experience using Go programming language for testing. While Go is gaining popularity – especially among systems application developers (for example, Docker is written in Go) and for developing microservices, not a lot of testers have much experience with Go.

That’s because Go is relatively new, and if you’re testing something as a black box (as QA typically does) then it doesn’t matter what programming language you use to write tests in.

Go does have testing capabilities — primarily targeting unit testing go ci, and at least one general purpose test framework I know of (Testify) and a couple BDD style frameworks (Ginkgo, GoConvey) and an HTTP client testing library (httpexpect), but for UI driven automation, while it is technically possible (WebDriver client libraries exist — tebeka/selenium) it is less complete and user friendly than in other programming languages (which testers may already know).

This post on Speedscale.com by Zara Cooper has a great reference for testing tools in Go.

The main reason to choose Go for writing tests, is if you are already writing all your other code in Go. Which means that you’re writing developer tests (even if not strictly unit tests), not user focused tests (like QA typically does).

By all means, if you’re writing microservices in Go, write tests for those services in Go too. (I recommend using Testify and go-resty or httpexpect.)

But there is no real advantage to use Go for writing test automation, especially if you’re testing a user interface (which is not written with Go).

I suggested that if you are set on looking for people to write automated tests with Go, that you either look for people experienced with go — look for projects that are written in Go (like Docker) and look for people who have worked on those projects — in the case of Docker, unless you’re developing the core of Docker itself you probably aren’t using Go. If someone has extensive experience using Docker that is no indication they have Go experience. This would be hard to do, and may still not find anyone with QA experience.

Rather, you should look for someone with QA aptitude and experience who has experience with at least 1 other programming language (Java, C#, Python, C, etc.) preferably more than one. And then account for some time for them to learn Go and get up to speed.

Good developers love learning new things — especially new programming languages, and good testers are good developers. If you’re hiring for someone based only on their experience with a particular programming language, or not looking for people who are comfortable learning more than one, then you lose out on people who are adaptive and curious, two traits that are way more important for testers than knowing any particular tool.

#golang #testing