unit testing is one of the basic steps of software engineering/development. you test your code units (functions and methods) with static input data sets to see if it matches the expected outputs. which if it does, means your code works. if it doesnt then you know you messed up somewhere. you are supposed to do this for all units when coding a new program.

for staking what i should have done (and didnt but its kinda too late now) is take the kernel that is used to create blocks out of the wallet code and made it a standalone program. had it accept input from a command line ( which ideally would be a block that has already been generated so that you can compare the output) then pipelined the output to a text file. i would then read the text file and compare it to the block in the chain. if it matched for 5 instances (arbitrary number i chose) then the staking would work and id copy the code back into the wallet.

i didnt do this. partly due to lack of time, partly because i grossly underestimated the difficulty level/possible issues that could possibly arise from the staking portion of the code.