Towards Property-Based Testing of Smart Contracts Using Gas Analysis (Short Paper)
Elvira Albert, Emanuele De Angelis, Marco Di Ianni, Fabio Fioravanti, Pablo Gordillo · DROPS (Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics) · 2026
Testing has become an integral part of the software development process in order to ensure the correct and safe execution of programs. A powerful approach to testing is property-based testing that aims at generating unit tests that verify that a certain property of interest holds. However, smart contracts are also characterized by important non-functional aspects, such as the gas consumption required to execute their functions. Static gas analyzers are able to obtain parametric gas bounds - that soundly over-approximate - the gas consumption of executing each of the public functions within a smart contract. This paper discusses our ideas towards combining both formal methods, property-based testing and gas analysis, in order to generate gas-aware unit tests that can ensure the gas requirements provided by the programmers.