Software Engineering Applications enabled by Blockchain Technology: A Systematic Mapping Study

The novel, yet disruptive blockchain technology has witnessed growing attention lately, due to its intrinsic potential. Besides the conventional domains that make use of such a potential such as finance, supply chain or healthcare, blockchain use cases in software engineering have emerged recently. In order to get a quantitative and qualitative overview of the state-of-art of blockchain uses for software engineering, we conducted a systematic mapping study that relies on the grounded guidelines for systematic mappings in software engineering. We identified 22 primary studies and extracted data within the research type, research topic and contribution type facets. Findings suggest an increasing trend of studies since 2018. Additionally, findings revealed the potential of using blockchain technologies to replace centralized systems such as GitHub, Travis CI and personal trust networks for packages verification, and to automate a variety of software engineering activities such as the acceptance phase, payment to developers, compliance adherence and software quality measurement. We suggest researchers to implement and evaluate their proposals in real-life scenarios and to carry out security and performance analysis of such proposals.