Building Quality In for Blockchain Systems

[Kathleen Martin]

Blockchain technology can be used to build solutions that can naturally deliver better software quality. Using blockchain we can shift to smaller systems that store everything in a contract. We have to understand our data needs and decide what is stored in the chain and what off-chain, and think about how requirements, defects and testing history can be built into the contract models.
Craig Risi spoke about testing in the blockchain at Agile testing Days 2021.
Risi mentioned that the key design principles that any Blockchain application should be designed around are data integrity, data transparency, scalability, reliability and availability. The trick is to start checking for all these attributes early in the design phase and have regular checks to ensure you are meeting them throughout the entire design process, Risi said.
In his talk, Risi provided several architecture design tips for working with Blockchain:

You want to work with small services and APIs to allow for the system to scale as needed and avoid single points of failure and build in redundancy so that your system remains highly available even when certain services are down.
To ensure your system meets these above requirements you want to spend a lot of time understanding your solution’s data needs; what is stored in the chain and what off-chain, how large the data elements that need to be stored are and how the encryption will happen.
Having clear requirements allows you to put automated tests in place that can verify the integrity of data in test environments, as you have the required information to mock and test effectively. Along with this functional test effort, effort should be invested in security to ensure that the endpoints that interact with smart contracts are incredibly secure.
Continue reading: https://www.infoq.com/news/2021/12/building-quality-blockchain