Why Is Blockchain Testing Important?

Unlike most data structures, once a smart contract is deployed to the blockchain, changes can not be made, so ensuring the efficacy of a contract is very important. It’s up to our engineers to perform comprehensive and custom sets of tests to make sure that mistakes, which cannot be fixed, are identified and mitigated.

When a defect is discovered in production the smart contract can’t be updated or rolled back, and a new version of the smart contract must be created and deployed. These new versions have to be manually created by applying the previous data into the new contract - an endeavor costly in time and resources for business leaders.

Blockchain Testing

Our engineers face a unique set of challenges when testing blockchain applications and smart contacts due to them being relatively new and evolving at a rapid pace. A few of the most common challenges that teams encounter are:

Blockchain transactions are Irreversible: Implementing blockchain without the utmost care is risky to organizations and their users because of the transactions being irreversible. Not having controls in place to avoid redundancy and provide additional safety measures is one of the most common challenges teams encounter.

• In-depth knowledge of technology: Blockchain is a new technology and needs to be tested by well-trained experts with domain knowledge.
• Continuous Addition of Blocks: Blockchain technology is meant to be used to store and process large amounts of data, but in order to accomplish this, new blocks are added at a quick and consistent pace. These continuous additions can create a strain on our engineers and can easily become a testing bottleneck.
• Integration Testing: Integration testing must be carried out frequently to avoid any failures, since there are multiple components involved in designing a Blockchain application.
• Handling crypto-graphical data: The primary goal of blockchain is the transmission of encrypted data. There is a high risk of failure if the transmission of the data is not tested properly during the development and testing processes.
• Performance Testing: Failing to do performance tests on blockchain applications can leave testing teams unaware of possible adverse effects caused by load levels or bandwidth constraints.
• Blockchain Testing Tools: There are very limited tools that can be used for blockchain testing. Moreover, these tools can be best leveraged by testers who have specific experience and knowledge of using them.