About This Course

This course has been developed to meet the growing need for blockchain-focused QA Engineers.

Everyone is talking about blockchain technology, especially in relation to smart contracts, which have the power to touch almost every area of our lives. Ethereum in particular has 30 times the number of developers involved in its ecosystem than its nearest competitor does. But where are all the QA engineers? It's a sad fact that many projects have gone live with little or no formal testing by anyone other than the person who developed the dApp. The consequence of working with bleeding-edge technology combined with a lack of formal quality assurance is that there have been bugs. Some have been minor, but others have caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A project built on the Ethereum blockchain may look identical to a normal, centralised application or API. But the differences are so great that the whole quality assurance process needs to be approached in a completely different way, requiring the QA engineer to dig deep into the code and conceptualise ways of pushing the underlying smart contracts to their limits with different data inputs and variations in network conditions and transaction fees.

This course has been developed to meet the growing need for blockchain-focused QA Engineers. The course provides hands-on examples of this type of rigorous exploratory testing and explains how to set up different test environments in order to do it.

Assuming the QA engineer – like any modern testing professional on an Agile project – is involved at the earliest stage of the project, he or she needs to ask questions about transaction fees, latency, privacy and data compliance. You will learn to specify acceptance criteria that can later be used as the basis for automating your acceptance tests, with quizzes, screencasts and exercises to test your understanding of the requirements. Test automation is a critical part of the QA process. You will learn about the most common test libraries and how to run your suite in a continuous integration environment.