Automated Testing to Boost Lisk Development Lightcurve, the company behind Lisk, promises that Lisk’s development will be sped up by using automated testing instead of manual











The new software testing procedure is a part of a new Quality Assurance program. "Automated Testing to Boost Lisk Development"

Drawbacks of Manual Testing





Lightcurve, the company behind Lisk, points out that manual testing is inefficient for a number of reasons.





First of all, this method consumes the biggest amounts of time. What’s more, this type of testing cannot be used in all scenarios due to factors like time limits, budget constraints or high difficulty.





Lisk has previously used manual testing only due to not having enough resources to be able to test the code automatically.





The project admits that this decision slowed down the process of software development significantly: so, a simple bug fix required 7 different manual steps to be made, including deploying the software on up to 500 virtual machines. This lack of efficiency forced the team to finally start using automated testing.





Automated Testing to Boost the Development Speed





Contrary to the manual testing, automated testing allows for almost no interruptions in the development process to be made. Such a continuous delivery allows developers to find bugs quickly and helps teams deliver new releases with confidence, reducing the time needed for the release process more than ten-fold in some cases.





The Lightcurve uses three types of automated tests:





Unit testing, which plays the role of a fast feedback mechanism for a developer

Integration testing, which defends the protocol against incorrect changes

Functional testing, which is a part of integration testing





Beyond Just Software Testing





In its blog post, Lisk states that it is only a piece of the puzzle called Quality Assurance (QA). QA incorporates requirements definition, designing the software, coding, control of the source code, product integration etc.





In the case of Lisk, the introduction of QA on Lightcurve improved the following areas of development:





Test plans are now designed together with tests scenarios thanks to the tight collaboration of the QA team and the developer team

Automated Test Framework was introduced, featuring sanity testing, regression testing, network testing etc

Jenkins and Ansible tools for Continuous Integration are now being used

NewRelic APM for Performance Testing is being used - this will allow Lightcurve to easier migrate Lisk to TypeScript language.



