How Do You Balance Automation and Manual Testing in Blockchain Projects?

Tushar Dubey · 2025-11-03T23:10:41+00:00

Our QA team often argues about what to automate in blockchain testing. Unit tests are stable, but once we touch integration or cross-chain flows, we get random RPC errors and gas issues. Some teammates say manual testing is outdated, while others claim automation is too fragile. I want to create a balance — keep the workflow efficient but still catch tricky state bugs. For those with experience, how do you decide what deserves automation versus what needs human judgment?

How Do You Balance Automation and Manual Testing in Blockchain Projects?

Tushar Dubey
@DataChainTushar

Updated: Nov 6, 2025

Views: 68

Our QA team often argues about what to automate in blockchain testing. Unit tests are stable, but once we touch integration or cross-chain flows, we get random RPC errors and gas issues. Some teammates say manual testing is outdated, while others claim automation is too fragile.
I want to create a balance — keep the workflow efficient but still catch tricky state bugs. For those with experience, how do you decide what deserves automation versus what needs human judgment?

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FintechLee

@FintechLee • 3w

Automation often breaks when the infrastructure changes, new RPC endpoints, forked networks, or different gas price strategies. After each deployment, I manually re-run a short regression suite to verify sanity before CI picks up again.

This hybrid model prevents bigger disasters later. It’s slower at first, but saves hours of debugging unstable scripts. I also schedule weekly reviews to decide which manual tests can graduate to automation once stable.

BlockchainMentorYagiz

@BlockchainMentor • 3w

I follow a simple rule: automate consistency, human-test complexity. If a scenario depends on predictable state changes like math operations or token transfers — it’s perfect for automation.

But anything involving upgradeability, access control, or CEI flow needs manual observation. Gas fluctuations, event emission timing, and role boundaries behave differently across networks. You can’t trust CI logs alone to interpret those results, humans still see patterns that tools miss.

AnitaSmartContractSensei

@SmartContractSensei • 2w

Our team uses a “70–20–10” formula: 70% automation for stable unit tests, 20% integration tests that touch real RPCs, and 10% manual exploratory testing. That ratio keeps us efficient without losing control over logic. Manual runs help verify if events emit correctly and if gas refunds behave as expected. I’ve caught several reentrancy-like side effects only during manual sanity checks that automation never flagged.