The Pester Book: The All-in-One Guide to Understanding and Writing Tests for PowerShell

Pester is a unit-testing framework for PowerShell, and perhaps the first open-source software product that ships with Windows itself! Author Adam Bertram will walk you through the Pester philosophy, syntax, and numerous real-world examples.

We’ll cover everything you need to know from knowing nothing about Pester and testing PowerShell scripts to becoming a testing master!

Part 1 covers the core syntax of Pester and introduces you to various possible use cases for the different syntax elements. It’s enough to get you up and running if you’re familiar with unit testing, or if you want to give Pester a spin.

Part 2 will take that syntax and dig into the world of unit testing and test-driven development, through a series of real-world walkthroughs. Some of these will be “stream of consciousness,” following the actual process someone might use to add or develop Pester tests. This part will also cover using Pester for infrastructure validation in an “infrastructure from code” environment.

Part 3 will introduce you to Gherkin. Gherkin is another style of test writing that comes with Pester. This part will introduce you to Gherkin, how it’s different than Pester test design and how it integrates with Pester.

Part 4 will tackle code coverage, an important topic to help make sure you’re testing all of your code but with some not-so-obvious gotchas, you need to watch out for.

Part 5 will be more of a “cookbook,” with recipes for testing specific types of situations. You will find many different, specific use-cases in here and how to test for them.