End-to-end testing is a methodology used to validate the flow and behavior of a system from start to finish.
This type of testing aims to emulate real-world scenarios and user interactions to ensure all interconnected components of a system work together correctly. It is designed to ensure the comprehensive testing of all critical pathways.
By simulating real user scenarios, end-to-end testing helps to expose potential issues in the interaction between different system components, uncovering problems that may not be detected with other types of testing, and thereby enhancing the reliability and robustness of the system.
E2E testing is extremely important for crypto applications because the stakes are so high.
For example, if a deployed app’s UI doesn’t match what’s happening at the smart contract level, users will lose funds (e.g. giving the wrong contract address access to their funds). Meanwhile, the app’s development team has no way to know this is happening. This is what happened to Curve Finance ($700k of user funds stolen) and BadgerDAO ($120M of user funds stolen).
For the industry to continue and accelerate adoption, users need safe and secure applications and developers need provide reliable, robust, and safe experiences.