A Survey of Verification, Validation and Testing Solutions for Smart Contracts

TL;DR

This survey reviews various testing, validation, and verification solutions for smart contracts, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages to improve smart contract reliability and reduce deployment costs.

Contribution

It categorizes and analyzes existing smart contract testing solutions, providing a comprehensive overview of their strengths and weaknesses.

Findings

Multiple testing solutions exist, including test networks and analysis tools.

Each solution has specific pros and cons for smart contract verification.

Effective testing reduces costs and increases smart contract reliability.

Abstract

Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met. However, designing and implementing a smart contract is not trivial since upon deployment on a blockchain, it is no longer possible to modify it (neither for improving nor for bug fixing). It is only possible by deploying a new version of the smart contract which is costly (deployment cost for the new contract and destruction cost for the old contract). To this end, there are many solutions for testing the smart contracts before their deployment. Since realizing bug-free smart contracts increase the reliability, as well as reduce the cost, testing is an essential activity. In this paper, we group the existing solutions that attempt to tackle smart contract testing into following categories: public test networks, security analysis tools, blockchain emulators and blockchain simulators. Then, we analyze these solutions, categorize them and show what their pros and cons are.