Designing a Blockchain Application

Abstract

Chapter 8 is the first of three chapters in this book that deal with blockchain application design, development and testing. The chapter begins with an outline of a series of considerations that blockchain application developers must assess during the design process. These include questions such as whether the application needs to be feature-heavy or feature-light; to what extent the application needs to be specialized; whether support for the app needs to be centralized or decentralized; or to what extent the application needs to be scalable. Moreover, this chapter provides an introduction to a fictional case study, comprised of two personas and their user story in order to familiarize readers with the need to create personas, and their user stories as first to determine the functional requirements for an application. Functional requirements are subsequently translated to technical requirements, which lead to the process of creating the specific tasks and steps associated with completing the application design process. The second part of this chapter briefly discusses some popular application design approaches, such as the Ancile, ontology-driven and model-driven approaches. The chapter discussion concludes with a table outlining eight important blockchain design considerations, including attributes and/or issues.