Guide to integration testing best practices for Soroban smart contracts, covering realistic local network setup, end-to-end user flows, state validation, edge case testing, and CI automation with practical examples.
This article provides developers with practical guidance on integration testing for Soroban smart contracts, emphasizing that unit tests alone are insufficient for contracts involving token approvals, inter-contract calls, and resource limits. It outlines five key practices: using realistic local networks instead of mocks, covering full end-to-end user flows across multiple contracts, controlling state and validating outcomes, testing edge cases and failure paths, and automating tests in CI/CD pipelines. The article includes real-world examples from a batch liquidation contract project, demonstrating CLI and JavaScript integration test setup, tooling recommendations (Soroban CLI, @stellar/soroban-client, Mocha/Jest), and debugging resource usage issues with profiling tools.