Truffle provides you two easy ways to do this via an interactive console, with your contracts available and ready to use. Truffle Console: A basic interactive console connecting to any Ethereum client
Truffle provides a default assertion library for you, but you can change this library at any time to fit your needs. You should be able to run your Solidity tests against any Ethereum client.
This opens up many possibilities; for example, you can interact with a real-world protocol/contract locally during development, step through, and debug main net transactions locally (using truffle debug),.
