Earlier bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were being talked about by media and other sources. These have experienced a major growth in their business and these cryptocurrencies are known all over the world in a short span of time.
Integration of Blockchain technology is not just limited to crypto currencies. Application of it is wide and has immense potential.
Since gaming has always been lucrative industry. Blockchain is now being integrated to it and lot’s of game are going to hit the market.
Obviously, testing these games is important. Let’s have a look at BlockChain Game Testing
Block Chain Network in Games
Blockchain Game Testing
Block chain games run on Block chain technology which needs special tools and skills for testing. There are various types of tests which can be executed at the different level of game development. Below is the list of different types of BlockChain Game Testing which can be executed to test the quality of Blockchain games.
- Unit Tests: These tests will ensure the coding is being performed correctly at the lowest level of the development cycle. Developers can use this test to determine whether their written code is efficient and performing well for small functions. This also ensures that the bugs and errors are detected at the earliest
- Integration Tests: This test will ensure whether the communication between codes and components is working properly or not. It helps developers and testers to test the behavior of interfaces of different components and their interaction between various software components.
- UI Testing: UI testing is vital to ensure that the user interface from the user’s end is functioning as expected. It will help in uncovering the working of application from user’s perspective. This test will also ensure that user experience is positive or at least is getting correct feedback if the application is not functioning properly.
- Application Programming Interface Testing: Application Programming Interface or API testing will ensure the interaction of software components with external APIs. This will help testers to generate API requests which are formatted and handled correctly and verify whether the requests and response are validated by the application or not.
Blockchain games also use a similar type of technology called smart contracts. This technology will enable testers to use the same testing procedure for testing APIs.
What are Smart Contracts?
Smart contracts are an essential part for validation of Blockchain games. It is a set of rules written in lines of code that is self-executing when the predefined conditions are met.
Although smart contracts are similar to API, they cannot call to external web APIs. It has a public function which can be requested by any user in the Blockchain network.
So, are you wondering why testers are essential in Blockchain games? It is because once these contracts are deployed in the network it cannot be changed again.
Thus, the testing which has to be performed on the application should be of a high level which covers almost every aspect of testing.
If any defect is found in production, contracts cannot be changed thus, a new version has to be created and deployed.
Not only this, existing data cannot be transferred to the new version and developers have to initialize this data manually into a new contract.
Hence, this increases the complexity of the development cycle and becomes important to run complete BlockChain Game Testing before it reaches production.
Skills Required to Perform Testing on Blockchain Games
Although Blockchain games are new to the development industries, there are a various set of skills which a tester should possess.
Testers can hone their skill sets and implement them while testing Blockchain games. Skills required are listed below:
- Critical Thinking: Blockchain games follow in-game transactions which can sometimes cause the problem to the people. Testers should think about questions like what will happen if there are various transactions pending simultaneously. What will happen to transactions if a, b, or c are not done? Will the user be able to get feedback if transactions are not executed? Testers should be easily able to tackle these types of the question with its ability to analyze critically and think around problems.
- Test Design Techniques: Testers are already familiar with test design techniques. This technique will help to understand the inputs and outputs of the game better. Testers can easily think around problems like how will the application execute if the input limit is exceeding predefined value? What will happen if the entered limit is exceeded, does the transaction will still execute? With this ability, testers will be able to tackle and test boundary value or equivalence portioning of the application.
- Automation: BlockChain Game Testing requires strong automation skills. Lower-level or high-level unit tests, integration tests, API tests, and UI tests skills would be required for a proper testing of Blockchain games. It will ensure to find major issues as soon as possible in the development cycle before going into production.
- Manual UI Testing: Manual testing is also needed for UI testing of the game. The tester can generally put their main concern on the issues which can be found easily by implementing manual exploratory tests. Tester with ability to work independently, trying to find detects by focusing on weak areas of the applications or exploring various areas of application. Despite, a lot of testing has been automated now still there is a need to improve manual testing skills to perform specific tasks.
- Learn New Tools Quickly: As technology advances, the list of tools used for testing also advances. The tester should be able to learn new tools quickly in order to grow their skills for testing Blockchain applications. It becomes vital to know how tools are used to detect any issue in Blockchain network.
What do you need to Test?
You’ll need to focus on certain aspects while doing BlockChain Game Testing. They are:
- Block Size: Testing block size during BlockChain Game Testing will ensure how many limits does each block contains. This will test the limit of the transaction in each game’s block.
- Chain Size: Testing of the block creation functionality and performance as the length of the chain is increased.
- Load: How much of transaction Blockchain game can handle simultaneously? This test will ensure the capability of the transaction load.
- Performance: How much time will it take for the query to look at every individual blocks in the chain? This will ensure the performance of the game.
- Security: Does the transaction in Blockchain games are secured enough? It will ensure the security of the application.
- Data Corruption: This test will ensure that there is no data corruption in the database.