IBM plans to develop a blockchain-based app testing system, according to a patent application released on April 5 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
A testing system for applications powered by blockchain is going to give a "simple and secure infrastructure for testing applications". IBM will use the decentralized aspect of blockchain to run their tests on multiple nodes, all the results will be safely stored on the distributed ledger.
The current cloud-based test infrastructures need large amounts of money to work, which could be reduced with their blockchain-based testing system, mentioned IBM.
"Software automation testing has become more hardware intensive as the complexity and requirements of new software applications continues to increase," as written in the patent application. "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 filing further explains that the system will work like smart contracts, which will give "all the information that is required to execute the test cases and the reward."
According to the patent application, IBM envisions an apparatus composed of three parties; a transmitter, a receiver and a processor. The transmitter would send a test request to a network of nodes, the receiver would then receive the results of the tests, and the processor would finally record and store the results on the blockchain.
In the beginning of March, IBM announced it had more than 63 clients for their blockchain services.
More recently, the giant tech company announced that it will launch a blockchain development platform.