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.

近年来，兼具创新性与颠覆性的区块链（blockchain）技术凭借其内在潜力，日益受到各界关注。除金融、供应链、医疗保健等已充分挖掘其应用潜力的传统领域外，区块链在软件工程领域的应用场景近年来也逐渐兴起。为从定量与定性双维度全面梳理区块链在软件工程领域的应用研究前沿，本研究遵循软件工程系统映射研究的既定规范指南，开展了一项系统映射研究。本研究共纳入22项原始研究，并从研究类型、研究主题与贡献类型三个维度提取相关数据。研究结果显示，自2018年以来相关研究呈逐年增长态势。此外，研究还发现，区块链技术可替代用于软件包验证的GitHub、Travis CI及个人信任网络等中心化系统，同时可实现多种软件工程活动的自动化，包括验收阶段、开发者薪酬发放、合规性遵循以及软件质量测评等。本研究建议相关研究者在真实场景中对其提出的方案进行实现与评估，并开展此类方案的安全性与性能分析工作。