What is the best way to iteratively develop a XCM pallet?

Question

Currently I have a local relay Rococo chain with 2 parachains (forked from the parachain template). I want to develop an XCM pallet that calls contract on another chain. cumulus-ping is working.

However a develop cycle takes awhile. I change something in the parachain, compile it, then restart relay chain, generate and submit the genesis head and validation function to the relay chain to test the feature ... Most of the tutorials I have seen assume I want to play with the existing chains. Is there a better/faster way to iterate on a code change?

Answer 1

You should write unit tests using the xcm-simulator which can emulate multiple parachains communicating over XCM:

https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot/tree/master/xcm/xcm-simulator

In this case, you would just need to execute cargo test ... to run the tests.