Feasibility of Test-Driven Development in Agile Blockchain Smart Contract Development: A Comprehensive Analysis

Abstract

Blockchain technology is revolutionizing the way transactions are conducted by addressing issues of trust and decentralization. It is not only promising, but also solves many of the issues which are getting created due to lack of trust among parties involved in a transaction. The success of blockchain relies on "Smart Contracts" Smart contracts are the digital contracts as agreed upon by the parties involved in the consensus of multi-party transactions. Smart Contract holds the logic of processing and creating each block of transaction. It is important that the smart contracts should be developed without any compromise on quality – even a small bug on smart contract can lead to huge loss for all parties involved in the transaction. As the software development has moved to continuous integration & continuous delivery mode, where the deliverables are delivered on each sprint basis following Agile development methodology, it is important to analyze if Smart Contracts can be delivered in similar fashion. In this work, focus is on one of the best practices of Agile methodology, which is Test Driven Development – where the smallest development unit can be tested and released. The analysis will be done on open-source smart contracts that are published in GitHub and analyzing the same.