Smart Contract Testing
A green suite and 100% coverage are not evidence of safety. Coverage records which lines ran, never whether an assertion could have failed. Before signing off, name which of the three searches below the suite actually performed. If the answer is none, it has only confirmed the cases someone already thought of.
For deployment sign-off, map each applicable risk to a search before concluding: configurable value math to fuzzing, stateful accounting to a handler invariant, and external integrations to a pinned fork. Run each applicable search. Inspection and targeted regression tests can confirm a suspected defect, but do not replace the search.
Make tests capable of failing
Rewrite any test that mirrors the implementation: stored state asserted against the value just written to it, a getter against the variable it returns, a constant against itself, constructor state against the constructor argument. These execute every line and constrain nothing.
Assert properties instead — round-trips, conservation between accounting and custody, monotonicity, access boundaries. Skip anything whose failure would be a bug in the compiler or in a dependency you did not write.
A bug that accumulates across a sequence cannot be seen by any test that exercises one operation in isolation, however many such tests exist. "Every operation is correct on its own" is the symptom, not the defence.
Fuzz the domain instead of picking from it
Before deploy, every owner-settable number that feeds value math — fee basis points, ratios, caps, exchange rates — needs a fuzz test over its whole accepted domain, using bound() rather than vm.assume(). Hand-picked values walk one branch; the fuzzer finds the value nobody proposed.
Reaching a suspected bug by reading the code and then writing one test for it confirms what you already believed. It is not a substitute for the search, and it stops at the first defect you happened to imagine.
First decide which values at a boundary are semantically usable; do not assume the exact limit is valid merely because only values beyond it violate a numeric inequality. Exercise the nearest valid value, the exact limit, and the first value beyond it where representable. Preserve separate evidence when the exact limit and the value beyond it fail through different paths.
Fork against the real deployment
Always fork for a contract that calls an external protocol (Uniswap, Aave, Chainlink; verified addresses in addresses/SKILL.md), handles a quirky token (USDT, fee-on-transfer, rebasing), or reads an oracle. Never for pure logic.
A mock encodes your assumption about the dependency, so more mock-based tests only re-test the assumption. Deployed tokens deviate from the interface they are called through — in what a call returns, in how much of a transfer arrives, in whether a balance stays put — and a mock written to the standard answers in the standard shape every time, so it can never surface the mismatch.
solidityvm.createSelectFork(vm.envString("MAINNET_RPC_URL"), 19_000_000);
Pin the block. An unpinned fork follows the chain head, so live prices and reserves move between runs: assertions drift red, flake green on re-run, and the local RPC cache never hits, which grows into slow runs and provider 429s.
Pinning an old block is an archive request. A full node keeps only recent state — geth's default window is roughly the last 128 blocks — and answers anything older with an error rather than a wrong number. Whether an endpoint serves archive depth is a property of the node and the plan behind it, not something a URL tells you: confirm it answers a historical eth_call at your block before pinning that block, or the tests fail for a reason that has nothing to do with the contract.
Invariant-test anything stateful
A vault, AMM, lending market or escrow does not ship on unit tests. State properties as equalities that must hold after any sequence: recorded assets equal assets actually held, total supply equals the sum of balances, x * y >= k.
Match the shape of the assertion to the failures it has to catch. A one-sided bound constrains one direction only — claims <= holdings fires on a shortfall and stays green through anything that leaves a surplus — so where value can be stranded as well as lost, the property has to be an equality or an explicit no-drift check.
One post-operation mismatch proves divergence, not accumulation. When claiming cumulative drift, show the gap after at least two operations capable of creating that drift — for example, two fee-bearing withdrawals, not setup followed by one withdrawal — or provide a stateful-invariant counterexample whose call sequence demonstrates the growth.
Point targetContract at a handler, never at the contract under test. Called directly, the fuzzer supplies random senders that hold no tokens and granted no approvals, so nearly every call reverts. Reverts are discarded rather than failing the run, and the invariant is then asserted against a contract that never left its initial state — green because nothing happened.
The handler owns setup: funded and approved actors, inputs bounded to valid ranges, multiple actors where the property is about interaction between them.
Read the calls/reverts statistics in the run output every time. A revert rate near 100% means the run proved nothing; set fail_on_revert = true to surface it while building the handler.
Before deploy
- No test asserts the implementation back to itself.
- Every owner-settable number feeding value math is fuzzed across its domain; each boundary's nearest valid value, exact limit, and first value beyond it are classified and exercised separately where representable.
- Every external integration and quirky token is exercised on a pinned fork against the real deployment, on an endpoint confirmed to serve that block.
- Stateful contracts have a handler-driven invariant tying accounting to custody, with a revert rate low enough that the sequences reached real states.
- Access control, zero, and max-value cases revert as intended.
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slither .run, with no high or medium finding left unaddressed.
