Contract-based Project Research Articles

Maintenance-related concerns for post-deployed Ethereum smart contract development: issues, techniques, and future challenges

Software development is a very broad activity that captures the entire life cycle of a software, which includes designing, programming, maintenance and so on. In this study, we focus on the maintenance-related concerns of the post-deployment of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executed programs that run on a blockchain. They cannot be modified once deployed and hence they bring unique maintenance challenges compared to conventional software. According to the definition of ISO/IEC 14764, there are four kinds of software maintenance, i.e., corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance. This study aims to answer (i) What kinds of issues will smart contract developers encounter for corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance after they are deployed to the Ethereum? (ii) What are the current maintenance-related methods used for smart contracts? To obtain the answers to these research questions, we first conducted a systematic literature review to analyze 131 smart contract related research papers published from 2014 to 2020. Since the Ethereum ecosystem is fast-growing, some results from previous publications might be out-of-date and there may be a gap between academia and industry. To address this, we performed an online survey of smart contract developers on Github to validate our findings and received 165 useful responses. Based on the survey feedback and literature review, we present the first empirical study on smart contract maintenance-related concerns. Our study can help smart contract developers better maintain their smart contract-based projects, and we highlight some key future research directions to improve the Ethereum ecosystem.

WillowTree: Project Driven with a Product Mindset

WillowTree began as a small digital products company in 2007. By 2020, it had more than 500 full-time team members operating out of offices in four locations, and it had launched hundreds of digital products, including mobile apps, websites, voice assistants, and TV experiences. But also in 2020, WillowTree was facing the most significant challenge in its 12 years of corporate existence—a global pandemic.By analyzing how WillowTree blends project and product management, students will gain insights into how a digital products services company integrates a product mindset within contract-based projects, and get the opportunity to brainstorm how WillowTree can further adapt to provide a unique value proposition during the pandemic and beyond. Excerpt UVA-S-0338 Oct. 2, 2020 WillowTree: Project Driven with a Product Mindset Introduction WillowTree began as a small digital products start-up company based in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2007. By 2020, WillowTree's more than 500 full-time team members had launched hundreds of digital products, including mobile apps, websites, voice assistants, and TV experiences. As WillowTree's website stated: We are driven by a simple goal: amaze our clients by delivering high quality digital products that solve their business needs, and ensuring our projects run smoothly, strategically and predictably. We not only create great products, we help our clients answer the strategic questions around what to build, and in what order. . . .

Co-creation of Socio-economic Values in Islamic Banking Service: Case Study Research in Pakistan

This study examines the case study research in Pakistan to show the importance of socio-economic values in the banking world by citing the case of Islamic banking. Following Sharia traditions, Islamic banking is more concerned with socio-economic values, such as well-being, trust, ethics and partnership than with economic values, such as money in terms of interest. To investigate the unique value, service system and value proposition in Islamic banking, we combined the results from literature review, press releases and interviews. The literature review showed that the Islamic banks ensure secure investments and profit or loss sharing. The press releases on banking websites showed that Islamic banking focuses on socio-economic values rather than economic values. The interview analysis showed that Islamic banking is mostly focused on justice and transparency of projects, achieved under the benevolent watch of the Sharia board, over all banking activities. These findings reveal that the backbone of value co-creation in Islamic banking is contract-based projects which create economic opportunities and social experiences, and ensure that in Islamic banks, values create value for the customer. This concept is typically seen even in modern services.

Coping with Quality Requirements in Large, Contract-Based Projects

A typical contract for delivering a large software system must address a variety of related issues such as system quality, timelines, delivery cost and effort, and service-level agreements. Interviews with 20 software architects revealed how they coped with quality requirements in this context.

Managing projects from a client perspective: The concept of the meetings-flow approach

In a typical contract-based project, having appropriate monitoring and intervention is critical so that the client can manage the black box-like supplier's development processes. The traditional milestone approach of progress checking is insufficient to serve this need. The partnering approach, on the other hand, seems overly burdensome to clients. An intermediate way of allowing a contract-based client to monitor and intervene in the development of a project is the meetings-flow approach (MFA). The MFA synergizes the interconnectivity of project functional meetings and institutionalizes a continuous method of intervention that forms a client-side sustainable project procurement process. This paper explores the concept and the design of the meetings-flow approach, and presents a descriptive case study to investigate its application. After discussing the initial results and lessons learned from this approach, the paper comparatively summarizes the MFA in terms of the roles it may play in client-side project management.

Retrospective: Supervising a Contract-based Project: The Contracting Agency’s Perspective

Retrospective: Supervising a Contract-based Project: The Contracting Agency’s Perspective

Supervising a Contract-Based Project: The Contracting Agency's Perspective

The purpose of this article is to provide a retrospective view of the management and coordination of a major development project which relied heavily on the services of a contractor. When a project is completed satisfactorily, one succumbs to the urge to reflect on the anticipated, as well as unanticipated, results of actions taken during the course of the project. This is, of course, done in anticipation that those actions which produced positive results can be replicated in future projects of a similar nature. Although the specifics of the article are peculiar to a project that identified the educational objectives in the basic skills for South Carolina, an attempt is made to isolate some potentially generalizable principles of supervision for such development projects.