Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third party organization in control of the transactions, and therefore it creates interesting research areas, especially from the perspective of technical challenges and limitations. In this research, we have conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology. Our objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective. We have extracted 41 primary papers from scientific databases. The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing. The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied. On the basis of this study, recommendations on future research directions are provided for researchers.

The objective of this industry study is to shed light on the current situation and improvement needs in software test automation. To this end, 55 industry specialists from 31 organizational units were interviewed. In parallel with the survey, a qualitative study was conducted in 12 selected software development organizations. The results indicated that the software testing processes usually follow systematic methods to a large degree, and have only little immediate or critical requirements for resources. Based on the results, the testing processes have approximately three fourths of the resources they need, and have access to a limited, but usually sufficient, group of testing tools. As

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Purpose – Constant changes in the environment seem to have become the biggest challenge of a modern enterprise, which emphasizes the constant need to integrate the enterprise into its changing environment. Aiming at eliminating the integration challenges, EA is proposed as a solution. The purpose of this paper is to survey and analyse the available literature on determining the role of EA in EI and also to identify gaps and state-of-the-art in research. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a systematic mapping study that found 50 papers in the intersection of EA and EI, these papers were surveyed, analysed, and classified with respect to research focus, research method, and paper type. Findings – Based on the analyses of the final 50 articles, the authors realized that “EA framework” is the dominating research focus of these studies. “Evaluation research” is recognized as the most common paper type in this area. However, “Experience paper” was a rare paper type in this research domain. “Constructive research” and “Case study/multiple case studies” are widely applied as the research method. “Survey”, “Delphi study” and “Grounded theory” are the least employed research methods. The conclusion was that there is a need for empirical research in this area. After analysing the articles based on their publication year, the authors also noticed a significant growth between 2004 and 2010. After 2010 the number of publications had a downward trend. Originality/value – To the knowledge of the authors, this study is the first systematic literature study regarding the role of EA in EI. There are several systematic literature reviews about the EA or EI separately but none of them has addressed the specific realm of the research. Hence, the goal of this study is to provide a map of existing literature to enable improvement of the practice with the known research results and to identify gaps for future research.

Enterprise architecture (EA) is widely employed to reduce complexity and to improve business-information technology (IT) alignment. Despite the efforts by practitioners and academics in proposing approaches to smoothen EA development, it is not easy to find a fully successful EA. Because EA development is a complex endeavour, it is important to understand the obstacles that practitioners face during EA development. With the grounded theory, we studied how obstacles during EA development emerged from practitioners' point of view in 15 large enterprises. The study identifies lack of communication and collaboration as the core obstacle that can explain many other obstacles. Communication and collaboration were also harmed by other perceived EA development obstacles, including lack of knowledge and support inside organization and issues imposed by external parties, hesitation in training personnel, setting too ambitious goals, constant change of management, (lack of) clarity in EA development process, lack of budget, forcing personnel to adopt EA, lack of motivation, organizational culture, and organizational structure deficiencies. The lack of communication and collaboration caused several undesired effects to organizations, such as being unable to set common goals and achieve a shared understanding, personnel's distrust, endangered EA governance, lack of innovation capability, lost competitive edge, and ineffective EA outputs. The study highlights that organisations should improve their communication and collaboration before embarking on EA to encounter fewer obstacles. We provide four recommendations for practitioners to improve communication and collaboration in EA development.