Blockchain Testing Tools

There are some pretty good tools and frameworks being developed that can help with both BlockChain development and testing.

Here are some of the blockchain testing tools,.

Ethereum

Ethereum is the best-known blockchain (other than Bitcoin), and it has some great frameworks for developing applications, many of which have libraries baked in to make testing fairly easy.

Ethereum Tester

Simply put, Ethereum Tester provides tools for testing Ethereum-based applications.

Truffle

Truffle bills itself as the most popular Ethereum development framework, and based on its 4,288 stars on GitHub it, clearly is popular.

It’s a development framework that has testing functionality, like the ability to write automated tests for your contracts in both JavaScript and Solidity and get your contracts developed quickly. It also works with popular test runners like Mocha and Chai.

Ganache (formally Testrpc)

Before you release your blockchain application to production, it’s important that you test it locally.

Ganache is the most-used library for testing Ethereum contracts locally. It works by spinning up a kind of mock blockchain that gives you access to accounts you can use for testing.

Rhian doesn’t feel that it conveys the same latency you get on a live system, doesn’t really replicate real-world scenarios for the time things take and so on. But it’s enough to let you compile a contract, deploy it, determine its cost, and debug it locally.

Populus

For testers who prefer Python, the Populus framework provides some powerful utilities for testing blockchain contracts. Testing in Populus is powered by the Python testing framework py.test.

Manticore

Manticore is a symbolic execution tool for analysis of binaries and smart contracts. Manticore enables human-assisted analysis and the automatic detection of vulnerabilities.

Hyperledger Composer

Hyperledge Composer is an open-source development tool that contains many functions to help build blockchain applications. Some of those features also 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 provides commands allowing you to easily run interactive “smoke tests” to ensure the deployment was successful. This also makes it easy to execute tests in a CI/D system.

System tests can also be created using Docker Compose and Mocha/Chai. You can start a runtime and deploy your business network definition, then programmatically create assets, submit transactions and inspect the state of asset registries.

Exonum Testkit

Testkit for Exonum Blockchain is a framework that allows you to test the operation of the whole service. Specifically, it allows you to test transaction execution and APIs in the synchronous environment (without consensus algorithm) and in the same system process.

Embark Framework

Embark is another popular framework for building, testing and deploying your app. It’s a framework that allows you to easily develop and deploy decentralized applications (DApps).

Corda Testing Tools

Corda is a blockchain-inspired, open-source distributed ledger platform. It has a built-in testing feature to help with:

BitcoinJ

BitcoinJ is a library for working with the Bitcoin protocol. It allows you to interact with Bitcoin and connect directly to the Bitcoin network. And by using the functions in this library, we can send and receive Bitcoins in real time.

The BitcoinJ documentation says it can maintain a wallet, send/receive transactions without needing a local copy of Bitcoin Core, along with many other advanced features. It’s implemented in Java but can be used from any JVM-compatible language; examples in Python and JavaScript are included.

For testing, BitcoinJ provides a TestUtils class that can do things like manufacture fake transaction objects and so on.

For ideas on how to take advantage of TestUtils, take a look at the test suite for BitcoinJ itself.