IBM Wants to Test New Apps With Blockchain

Blockchain development is rapidly growing, and so are the number of patents being filed that utilize the technology for its promise of cybersecurity, anonymity, and decentralization.

IBM filed a patent in 2013 for a system to track values of cryptocurrencies. In its paperwork, IBM wrote that blockchain would keep track of the “life cycle of any individual e-currency token,” for illegal use and to more accurately predict its worth. Recently, the software company filed another patent to test software applications using blockchain.

A New Testing Infrastructure

The New York-based tech firm expanded on its intention with blockchain in the patent application; it plans to use a “blockchain test configuration” that provides “a simple and secure infrastructure for testing applications”.

Miners would be allocated tasks for testing and be rewarded with bitcoin or an altcoin after completing the given task. IBM theorizes this set-up would decrease the amount of resources and budget that cloud-based testing requires.

The filing elaborated, “Software automation testing has become more hardware-intensive as the complexity and requirements of new software applications continue to increase. To run automation test cases at a needed frequency requires a large hardware pool of resources which can exponentially increase as the test cases and number of applications increase.”

The Plan

IBM’s strategy follows a three-pronged approach. The plan includes a platform where users can submit requests to a network of nodes to test software or applications. It would execute through a process similar to smart contract generation.

The contract would include any information that is “required to execute the test cases and the reward” for the miners. Other, more general information could be added to “an entire P2P network in a ledger”. When the project is completed and test results are released, the findings could be recorded on a blockchain as well.

The three parts include an apparatus that’s outfitted with a transmitter which sends test requests to the network of nodes we mentioned earlier. A receiver would get the results of the test, and a processor would record results on the blockchain.

A non-transitory computer would store instructions for starting the processor to send a test request, transmitting the request, getting the results and recording them on the blockchain.

It’s certainly a unique idea, and who doesn’t like the promise of lower budgets and decreased energy consumption?