Why we need dedicated testers on blockchain projects. Role of the modern tester and how it applies to blockchain.

For applications where data is immutable and millions of dollars (and potentially lives) are at stake, a strong ethical stance is important, and this should be part of quality assurance for the product. How far can we replicate the live network with local nodes and testnets? Evaluating how and when to test.

• Examples of smart contract bugs
• How might these have been mitigated?
• The modern test engineer - an evolving career
• Shifting left in software development
• When would you use a mock (JSONRPC), a local node, the testnet, the live network?
• Recap of smart contract deployment, with a look at boundary testing inputs
• Testing to minimise gas fees

In a ‘shift left’ development environment, the QA engineer should be an integral part of the team who develops the user stories and requirements. How do these differ from the requirements in a non-blockchain project? And how can we write even the most Agile test plans in a world that is rapidly evolving?

We take a deep dive into writing BDD scenarios that can be later used for acceptance tests, and take a qualitative overview of how the user interface reflects what is happening in the blockchain. Manually testing smart contracts using exploratory and session-based techniques is covered here.

• Behaviour-driven development
• Deriving scenarios from user stories
• Working with non-technical product owners
• Is blockchain tech the right solution?
• Consequences of immutability
• UI and messaging - highlighting immutability to end user
• Handling latency - how much is acceptable
• User-generated data - testing at the boundary
• Testing combinations of data, caller and value
• Test planning

Many of the tools we use for automated testing in a blockchain context are familiar, others less so. Automated tests are critical to the success of a project.

Here we cover the most popular options and write our own test contracts and functional tests, both with and without using a framework. This is important because while Truffle provides a clean room each time the tests are run (so the tests do not share state with each other), we need to ensure we do this ourselves if we are not using a framework.

• Testing using Remix
• Compiler warnings
• Overview of static analysis tools
• How state works in Ethereum
• Continuous integration
• Solidity test contracts
• Automated tests for Truffle
• Automated tests for contract without framework
• Automated checks for gas costs

How do some of the more popular test techniques relate to developing blockchain applications? We look at effectively running sessions and conducting risk-based testing. Nonfunctional requirements are often ignored, but this is dangerous.

With public blockchains, gas costs add a new dimension to NFRs that need to be taken into account. How can we test our business model against fluctuating gas costs? When using a public blockchain, events such as forks can force a need for monitoring in production to ensure the resilience of our app. We cover tools and techniques that can be used to do this, and finish with a roundup of some of the most popular bug bounty programs that are around at the moment.

• Session-based testing
• Risk-based testing
• Security audits
• Monitoring
• Performance testing
• Monitoring gas cost
• Forks and replay attacks
• Regulatory requirements
• Compliance
• Bug bounty programs