Go 1.9 will ship a Helper() function defined on *testing.T so that you can finally write assert helpers which actually point you to the position where the assertion fails! Table based tests are still great!

Test

package helper

import "testing"

func TestHelper(t *testing.T) {
	a := &asserter{T: t}
	a.Equal(1, 1)
	a.Equal(1, 2)
	a.Equal(1, 3)
}

type asserter struct {
	T *testing.T
}

func (m *asserter) Equal(a, b interface{}) {
	m.T.Helper()
	if a != b {
		m.T.Errorf("expected %#v (%T) was %#v (%T)", a, a, b, b)
	}
}

Output

=== RUN   TestHelper
--- FAIL: TestHelper (0.00s)
        run_test.go:8: expected 1 (int) was 2 (int)
        run_test.go:9: expected 1 (int) was 3 (int)
FAIL
exit status 1
FAIL    github.com/tobstarr/gohelper    0.001s

Test with

docker run -t -i --rm \
  -v $(pwd):/go/src/github.com/tobstarr/gohelper \
  golang:1.9beta1-alpine  \
  go test -v github.com/tobstarr/gohelper