What is Blockchain?
It is accepted as a data structure which does exist in many different places at once and which is also very difficult to make the required amendments to as one finds it difficult to delete from it. One can only add to it.
This is a perfect feature as it allows the exchanging of its central power structure model for a rather decentralized network of various independent record keepers.
This sort of approach does minimize the possibility of an unauthorized person who will be able to manipulate records. Thus, the records are more secure, providing users with more confidence in the digital data that is provided within the blockchain.
How Do You Test Blockchain Applications?
The respective individuals working on the given blockchain applications do need to possess amazing mathematical as well as cryptographic skills, but it does involve normal testing.
Testing techniques such as testing at the boundary, performance testing, compliance well as security testing, does apply to the blockchain. Sometimes it is a matter of getting familiarized with some of the commonly available blockchain testing tools that do exist out there.
Blockchain Testing Tools
These assist in development and testing. Here are few of them:
Ethereum
This is the popular blockchain (other than Bitcoin), and it consists of some great frameworks for the development of applications.
Ethereum Tester
This provides tools for testing the Ethereum-based applications.
Truffle
This is the most popular Ethereum development framework as it is based upon 4,288 stars on GitHub.
It is a development framework that has the testing functionality such as the ability to write automated tests for one’s contracts in both JavaScript and Solidity and get one’s contracts developed quickly. It also does work well with popular test runners such as Mocha and Chai.
Ganache (formally Testrpc)
This is the most-used library for rather testing Ethereum contracts locally. It indeed works by spinning up a sort of mock blockchain that does provide access to accounts one can use for testing.
Populus
This is for testers who prefer Python as the Populous framework does provide some powerful utilities for testing blockchain contracts. Testing in Populous is of course powered by the Python-based s testing framework py.test.
Manticore
This is symbolic execution tool for the analysis of binaries and smart contracts. It enables human-assisted analysis and the automatic detection of vulnerabilities.
Hyperledger Composer
This happens to be an open-source development tool that does contain many functions to help the building up of blockchain applications. Some of its features do help with testing. More specifically, it supports three types of testing: interactive testing, automated unit testing and automated system testing.
It has a command-line interface that does provide commands which allow one to easily run interactive “smoke tests” to be able to ensure that the deployment was successful. This also does make it easy to execute tests in a CI/D system.
System tests can also be created by making use of Docker Compose and Mocha/Chai. One can start a runtime and also deploy one’s business network definition, then also programmatically create assets, submit transactions and also inspect the state of asset registries.
Exonum Testkit
This is meant for Exonum Blockchain and is a framework that does allow one to test the operation of the whole service. Specifically, it allows one to test the transaction execution and APIs in the synchronous environment without consensus algorithm and in the rather same system process.
Embark Framework
This is another popular framework for the building, testing as well as deploying one’s app. It is a framework that does allow one to easily develop as well as deploy the decentralized applications (DApps).
Corda Testing Tools
This is a blockchain-inspired and is open-source distributed ledger platform. It has indeed a built-in testing feature in order to help with:
- Writing contract tests
- Integration testing
- Writing flow tests
- Load testing
