Hey guys, I just bought some BitCoins after being lazy to do it for the last few years, but also looked at the client code and the messages that are going on this mailing list. I saw that there are quite some unit tests, but I didn't find integration test for BitCoin, and I believe that it's quite important for the future of BitCoin (making the current code more stable, testing attack scenarios, refactoring and extending code).
I have wrote some integration tests before at other projects, and they usually turned out useful, but I have 0 experience with the BitCoin development and codebase. I wrote a short document of what I think would be the safest way to do the testing (but not yet the tests themselves, as I don't have enough experience..I'd like to have something like testing that the wallets are empty, and after somebody mines she'll have more money..after she sends money to the other person, the other person will see it...things like this, just to get to know the code base). What do you guys think? The plan is here: https://github.com/xiphias/bitcoin/blob/master/src/test/integration/README.md Please feel free to comment/fork, I'll try to write all your replies in the document as well. Also here's the text to make it easier to comment: Integration testing for bitcoin ================================ Tests that simulate multiple bitcoin users and can verify that the whole network of bitcoin clients work together to achieve the goals of Bitcoin. Also maybe [System testing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_testing) would be a better name for the tests, but I'm not sure. Goals --------- - Make the bitcoin code easier to refactor while increasing the guarantee that it doesn't break the overall behaviour of the client. - Make it easier to have multiple experimental coins (for example LightCoin or PPCoin) in the codebase, while guaranteeing that the original BitCoin protocol doesn't break - Make it easy to test attack scenarios (like DOS, releasing an incompatible BitCoin client), monitoring - Have tests without (or at least minimal number of) unreadable constants and unreadable fake data to make them easier to verify. Proposed implementation ------------------------------------ The first implementation should use the JSON-RPC interface and build up as much verification of BitCoin network as possible. It should be in C++, which makes it easier to move to the second implementation. The JSON-RPC calls should be hidden by a C++ interface. The second implementation should use the same interface that was used for JSON-RPC, but using the BitCoin code directly (while not breaking the JSON-RPC tests). For this the BitCoin client has to be refactored as a library, getting rid of all global variables (and having them in a data structure), so that multiple BitCoin clients can be run in the same process. The improvement of the second implementation should have dependency injection for the time and for finding/verifying a mined block, so that the tests don't need to use real CPU power for mining, and they can run faster and test more complex scenarios. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Minimize network downtime and maximize team effectiveness. Reduce network management and security costs.Learn how to hire the most talented Cisco Certified professionals. Visit the Employer Resources Portal http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/employer_resources/index.html _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
