Abstract
The novel, yet disruptive blockchain technology has witnessed growing attention, due to its intrinsic potential. Besides the conventional domains that benefit from such potential, such as finance, supply chain and healthcare, blockchain use cases in software engineering have emerged recently. In this study, we aim to contribute to the body of knowledge of blockchain-oriented software engineering by providing an adequate overview of the software engineering applications enabled by blockchain technology. To do so, we carried out a systematic mapping study and identified 22 primary studies. Then, we extracted data within the research type, research topic and contribution type facets. Findings suggest an increasing trend of studies since 2018. Additionally, findings reveal the potential of using blockchain technologies as an alternative to centralized systems, such as GitHub, Travis CI, and cloud-based package managers, and also to establish trust between parties in collaborative software development. We also found out that smart contracts can enable the automation of a variety of software engineering activities that usually require human reasoning, such as the acceptance phase, payments to software engineers, and compliance adherence. In spite of the fact that the field is not yet mature, we believe that this systematic mapping study provides a holistic overview that may benefit researchers interested in bringing blockchain to the software industry, and practitioners willing to understand how blockchain can transform the software development industry.
Highlights
Organisations worldwide are showing an increasing interest in blockchain technology due to the promise of significant business benefits
Studies were excluded in the second phase mainly because they focus on software engineering issues in blockchain-oriented software, which is outside the scope of our study
While it is true that Bitcoin, the first blockchain application, was invented in 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto, smart contracts became popular with the release of Ethereum in 2015, as a Turing-complete blockchain platform
Summary
Organisations worldwide are showing an increasing interest in blockchain technology due to the promise of significant business benefits. Ethereum allows building decentralized applications, ranging from financial applications, semifinancial applications, such as self-enforcing rewards for solutions to computational tasks, to non-financial applications, such as decentralized governance and online voting [3] This is possible due to Ethereum’s built-in Turing-complete programming language, which enables anyone to write smart contracts, and to create their own ownership rules and formats of transactions. In 2015, the Linux Foundation launched the Hyperledger project to encourage the development of permissioned blockchains that allow a restricted set of known and identified participants to participate in the network. In this way, secure interactions among participants that share a common goal but do not fully trust each other can be achieved, for instance, businesses that exchange goods or information [4].
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