BlockChain Testing: The Why, The How and The What
BlockChain technology has grown tremendously popular in the recent times owing to its speciality of creating a decentralized, tamper-proof system. It was implemented in the financial sector in the beginning as it was secure and did not require a 3rd party intermediatory like a bank or government. With the advancement in technology. Block Chain is now being adopted in an innovative way by numerous industries not just limited to the financial sector.
A recent study by the World Economic Forum, revealed that 10% of the GDP will be in Blockchains or Blockchain-based technologies by 2025 which underlines the fact that Blockchain technology can be recognized as the future and businesses should assess if it can be adapted for their business growth. This emergence of BlockChain technology in the IT Horizon also put forward the importance of testing the applications developed based on Blockchain technology.
What is a BlockChain?
Blockchain in simple terms is a highly secure and encrypted digital ledger. BlockChain as the name suggests is in the form of a chain of blocks and these blocks are linked to each other through cryptography. One of the most popular advantages of BlockChain is that virtually anything of value can be tracked and traded on a BlockChain network which reduces the risk and cutting costs of the industries adapting to BlockChain protocol.
Testing BlockChain Applications
A Blockchain is usually present in a distributed or decentralized network of nodes. Every node present in this network has a copy of the blockchain transaction history and the verification process in the blockchain network is a consensus mechanism based process. In order to verify a new transaction and create a new block, all the nodes present, must receive input values that are cross verified against specific available data. Different encryption techniques must be followed for the interaction between nodes sharing the transactional data. Validating all these entities is a requisite for ensuring that the developed blockchain ecosystem is functioning as expected.
Testing Types
Functional Testing
Functional Testing plays a vital role in evaluating the business circumstances and effectiveness of use-case scenarios. Some of the most key points to be considered while performing a BlockChain Functional testing are given below.
Block Size: Each block in a blockchain has a memory size of 1 MegaBytes. A Tester or QA should focus on test scenarios like what encryption techniques should be used to connect blocks which exceeds 1 MB.
Data Transmission: A tester should focus on whether any data is lost during transmission between blocks. This is a top priority test to be performed as data transaction and security are on of the most unique feature of BlockChain architecture.
Adding a block: A tester should carefully evaluate each block which are added to the chain as no modification is possible once they are added to the chain.
Smart Contract: The best way to ensure the smooth functioning of the BlockChain application is to make sure that the parties involved in transactions are adhering to the rules of the smart contract.
Node Testing: Independent testing of all the diverse nodes present on the network is another way to ensure the smooth functioning of the BlockChain application.
Integration Testing
The blockchain consists of different blocks. And the blockchain ecosystem is created by connecting all these blocks together. So, it is vital that the different APIs associated with these blocks are tested for their compatibility with each other.
Performance Testing
Performance testing holds a very important position in BlockChain testing as the number of transactions and the size of transactions affects the performance of a block. Network, sequence of transactions at each node, transaction processing speed, and user and system interface along with the responses required from smart contracts are some of the other crucial parameters that needs to be verified by using Performance Testing. Proper testing of the network size and the ability of the system to process multiple number of transactions is of utmost importance as it helps us to identify hardware and software leaks or blocks before moving it to production.
Security Testing
Security Testing also plays a prominent role in BlockChain applications. It is necessary to check whether if the application is vulnerable to attacks and to also verify the credibility of the authorization and authentication systems. If there is a breach in the identity layer while a transaction is in progress, we won’t be able to halt the transaction immediately. So proper and extensive security testing is a must to ensure that the BlockChain application safeguards the sensitive information and valuable data from hackers or malwares.
Security Testing also considers the integrity, confidentiality, non-denial of services, availability etc. Crypto currency-based applications also require security testing. Components like Wallet Signature methods, private keys and application platform dependencies etc. needs to be tested regressively in order to ensure smooth and secure transactions.
Tools used for Testing BlockChain Applications
Ethereum Tester
Ethereum is one of the most utilized platforms for building blockchain apps. Ethereum Tester tool is used mainly for Web3 Integration, API, Smart Contracts, Backend etc.
Ganache (Testrpc)
A simulation of BlockChain is created with the help of this tool so which allows the user to create and use multiple accounts for testing purposes. One of the disadvantages of this tool is that since the test is performed in a simulation model, a perfect test result cannot be obtained.
Hyperledger Composer
It is an open-source tool which helps to model and test a blockchain network with minimum set of tools. Hyperledger Composer facilitates blockchain development with a modelling language, a UI and a CLI.
Exonum Testkit
This tool is used to test the activity of the entire service in a blockchain application. API Testing and transaction execution can be performed without any network operation and consensus algorithm.
Populus
This tool is a peer-to-peer invoice platform which utilises the distributed ledger technology feature of BlockChain to provide a global trading platform for invoice financing.
Manticore
This is a symbolic execution tool for analysis of binaries and smart contracts in BlockChain applications.
Corda Testing Tools
This open-source distributed ledger platform tool has built-in testing features that helps in writing contract tests, Integration testing and Load testing.
Truffle
This tool is mainly used by Ethereum developers and includes a variety of testing features like automated contract testing.
Conclusion
In addition to the tools mentioned above, there are additional testing tools and frameworks like BitcoinJ, Embark Framework etc.
To sum up, inorder to develop a BlockChain application that is totally secure and can handle bulk of data, end to end testing covering all test scenarios and preferably 100% code coverage plays a key role.