Re: [Bitcoin-development] Integration testing for BitCoin

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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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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