Life Cycle Of Smart Contract Development
An in-depth guide to getting a complete understanding of the procedures involved in a Smart Contract development
In this article, we are going to discuss the life cycle of smart contract development and the steps that should be taken to develop and deploy secure smart contracts.
The potential ability of smart contracts has gone beyond simple asset transfer to holding agreement between two or multiple parties at large scale this reduce the role of lawyers, as smart contracts gain attraction in areas from adjudicating traditional legal contracts to producing customizable smart contract templates that’s why smart contract security is necessary.
The life cycle of smart contract development
The life cycle of smart contract development involves crucial steps that ensure a secure development and deployment of smart contracts on the blockchain.
Imperative Steps while developing Smart Contracts
Understand the use-case of smart contract.
create a basic architecture of smart contracts interaction or flowchart how functions will interact with each other.
Start development using any IDE or development tools like Truffle, remix with proper documentation of each and every function.
Once the development is completed start testing smart contracts on test-net or private blockchain.(this is called a manual testing).
Record all the transaction while testing on test-net, analyze results of all transactions with actual use case or business logic of smart contract.
Unit testing will be the next step in smart contract development life cycle, there are multiple frameworks for unit and integration testing that can be use to test smart contract. Example : Truffle framework.
Once unit testing is done using truffle framework on ganache, smart contract author should go for 3rd party Audit of smart contract.
Last but not the least, bug bounty programs are also very efficient to secure smart contracts. Communities like 0x protocol is offering $100,000 in bounty programs.
Let’s discuss all the steps in detail.
Understand the Use case :
Use case of smart contracts should be clear before development is started; the developer should gather all the information of smart contracts like business logic, also all the 3rd party libraries that the developer will use while developing a smart contract.
Architecture design of the smart contract
A basic architecture depicts the business logic of a smart contract. Architecture design in the initial phase helps developers to follow the exact path during the development phase.
Sample architecture diagram to show how smart contract work
Development phase
In this phase, actual development is started; developer can use any code editor or IDE to develop a smart contract, also follow best practices while developing smart contracts, and link to follow best practices.
Available IDE: Remix Ethereum
Manual Testing
In this phase smart contract should be tested well on the test net (Rinkeby/Ropsten), all the transaction and state changes should be recorded to verify that the smart contract’s behaviour is the same as that intended to be.
Remix.ethereum is the best IDE to manually test smart contracts and use matamask to send transactions to the blockchain.
remix.ethereum will help to remove all the syntax errors and also you can debug all your transactions using debugger of remix IDE.
You can check out how to debug smart contract transactions using remix in our recent blogs.
Unit testing
Unit testing can be done using the truffle framework, developer should write test cases for all the functions of the smart contract, test cases should reflect correct the business logic of the smart contract.
you can see the sample truffle unit test result in the below picture.
3rd party security audit
All the Smart contracts ready for production should be audited before deploying on the main net because even though the business logic of smart contracts is tested on the test-net several times, a smart contract cannot be declared as secured or bug-free contract, a smart contract may contain some logical errors that can be identified by the audit.
You can also check out our blog on the audit checklist, how an audit can be helpful to secure smart contracts and pull you out from becoming the next victim of attackers.
Bug Bounty
Bug bounty programs are very useful in identifying bugs in a smart contract, as your smart contract will come under the eye of multiple experienced auditors or developers to find the loopholes in the smart contract, even after two successful 3rd party audits, 0x protocol project have also conducted a bounty program in order to find the potential bug in the smart contract.
All the recognized security tools must be used on smart contracts in order to get the confirmation of secure code before deploying on the main-net, also ask your auditor to provide you results of all the security tools listed below.
Code Coverage
code coverage is a special tool that evaluates how efficient your test cases, Solidity-coverage is used to know how much your test cases are penetrating your smart contract functions. by this, you will be able to know that your unit test cases have touched all of your functions and business logic is validated in unit testing.
Up-gradable Smart contracts are also considered as a part of a life cycle of smart contract, you can check out about up-gradable smart contracts in the below link.
https://medium.com/quillhash/how-to-write-upgradable-smart-contracts-in-solidity-d8f1b95a0e9a
Some security and visualizing tools :
Visualization:
Solidity Visual Developer ,Surya , Solgraph, Evm-Labs, Ethereum-graph-debugerStatic and Dynamic Analysis:
Slither, Mythril, Oyente, Securify, SmartcheckTest Coverage:
Solidity-coverageLinters and Formatters:
Linters improve the code's quality.
Solcheck, Solhint, Solium, Prettier Solidity PluginAbout QuillAudits
QuillAudits is a secure smart contract audits platform designed by QuillHash
Technologies.
It is an auditing platform that rigorously analyzes and verifies smart contracts to check for security vulnerabilities through effective manual review with static and dynamic analysis tools, gas analysers as well as simulators. Moreover, the audit process also includes extensive unit testing as well as structural analysis.
We conduct both smart contract audits and penetration tests to find potential
security vulnerabilities which might harm the platform’s integrity.
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