Re: [Bitcoin-development] Integration testing for BitCoin

[Adam Ritter <aritter@gmail.com>]

Hey guys,
it sounds great. I read through the bitcoinj documentation and started
reading the code.
A few years ago it wasn't a full client, but now that I see that it's
almost there, it looks much more interesting :-)
Testing the reorg looks critical.

Thanks for the help everyone,
Adam

On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 7:21 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
> In bitcoinj we desperately need integration tests to exercise the wallet
> code, and I think if it was done well the tests would be applicable to
> bitcoind as well. There have been a series of bugs in bitcoinj that boiled
> down to "the unit tests were not realistic enough", either because they
> stopped simulating too early or they weren't combining multiple different
> things together in the same ways as happens on the real network. Sometimes
> timing was an issue too.
>
> Examples of what I mean - ensure that re-orgs are handled correctly and
> update the wallet properly in every case, etc.
>
> Something else that would be really useful, a standalone tool that
> stress-tests the system. If we had a tool that randomly generated chains of
> transactions we might have caught the bdb lock limit bug earlier. You could
> write such a tool using bitcoinj easily, or the raw transaction APIs on
> bitcoind.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Adam Ritter <aritter@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thanks guys, it sounds great.
>> Testing the JSON-RPC is/was not the main goal, just an interface for
>> testing.
>> I didn't know that the bitcoinj implementation is getting close to a
>> full implementation..it sounds interesting, as it's much easier to
>> understand and work with. I'll look at the test cases.
>>
>> Thanks very much,
>> Adam
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Adam Ritter <aritter@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> 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).
>> > [...]
>> >> 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.
>> >
>> > I prefer to call them system tests.
>> >
>> > We use a system called blocktester that Matt Corallo wrote,
>> >
>> > https://code.google.com/r/bluemattme-bitcoinj/source/browse/core/src/test/java/com/google/bitcoin/core/FullBlockTestGenerator.java?name=fullverif&r=874c5904b12d1fcec5b556429cf208f63cd4e1bc
>> >
>> > It's based on BitcoinJ and works by simulating a peer against a
>> > slightly instrumented copy of Bitcoin(d/-qt) (modified to avoid
>> > computationally expensive mining).  The tests simulates many
>> > complicated network scenarios and tests the boundaries of many
>> > (hopefully all) the particular rules of the blockchain validation
>> > protocol.  We can use these tests to compare different versions of the
>> > reference software to each other and to bitcoinj (or other full node
>> > implementations) as well as comparing them to our abstract
>> > understanding of what we believe the rules of the protocol to be.
>> >
>> > These tests are run as part of the automated tests on every proposed
>> > patch to the reference software. Via a robot called pulltester which
>> > comments on github requests and produces logs like this:
>> >
>> > http://jenkins.bluematt.me/pull-tester/92a129980fb9b506da6c7f876aa8adb405c88e17/.
>> > Pulltester also performs automatic code coverage measurements.
>> >
>> > Additionally, we run a public secondary test bitcoin network called
>> > 'testnet', which can be accessed by anyone by starting the reference
>> > software with testnet=1.  Testnet operates the same as the production
>> > network except it allows mining low difficulty blocks to prevent it
>> > going for long times without blocks, and some of the protective
>> > relaying rules against "non standard" transaction types are disabled.
>> >
>> > Most of this testing work has been centered around validating the
>> > blockchain behavior because thats what has serious systemic risk.
>> > Measuring the json rpc behavior is strictly less interesting, though
>> > interesting too.
>>
>>
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