An Agile Software Engineering Method to Design Blockchain Applications

Marchesi, Michele; Marchesi, Lodovica; Tonelli, Roberto

doi:10.1145/3290621.3290627

Cited by 73 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(9 reference statements)

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“…The processes described above are actually iterative processes that allowed us to gradually refine the system design through cyclic iterations. Acknowledged the risks and the open challenges in Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering (Porru et al, 2017), we decided to adopt the Agile BlockChain Dapp Engineering method (ABCDE) (Marchesi et al, 2018), a recently proposed methodology conceived to manage BOS specific issues, in the design and implementation phases of dApps.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Use Case diagram is useful to understand the overall structure of the system. A very recent software engineering methodology for BOS design, the "Agile BlockChain Dapp Engineering" (ABCDE) (Marchesi et al, 2018), suggests proceeding by splitting the system in two main FIGURE 3 | The sustainability awareness diagram we created to better understand the system and its potential effects in the five sustainability dimensions. In red are the potential effects that could represent a threat to the sustainability.…”

Section: Use Case Diagrammentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If we find out that the bug resides in the on-chain component of the system (i.e., inside a Smart Contract deployed within the blockchain) we will have to face the fact that the smart contract op-code is unchangeable once deployed. Software engineering researchers have already highlighted this problem (Porru et al, 2017;Marchesi et al, 2018), and several results propose strategies for effective testing of smart contracts (see for instance Destefanis et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2019) to limit the presence of defects in the final version of the system. In any case, undiscovered bugs could remain in the smart contract, and we have to manage such a situation during the software life cycle.…”

Section: Sustainability Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The paper presents a reproducible development method for the realization of a specific blockchainbased decentralized Application (dApp) in full awareness of sustainability issues and in the full use of the practices of Software Engineering for blockchain-oriented software, BOSE (Porru et al, 2017). In particular, the method inherits the recent software development methodology "ABCDE: Agile BlockChain DApp Engineering" (Marchesi et al, 2018), conceived to drive dApp development from the definition of system goals to the implementation of the system user interface. In addition, in this paper we present the application of a software sustainability analysis.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Design of a Sustainable Blockchain-Oriented Software for Building Workers Management

et al. 2020

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The building workers sector is one of the most challenging sectors for Human Resources (HR) management. In this work, we propose a solution relying on Blockchain technology and present the design of a Blockchain-Oriented Software system conceived for managing the building workers sector with a focus on workers' safety, and it is guided by sustainable and Agile Methodologies in software design. The proposed approach takes advantage of different features of the Blockchain technology and provides transparency for labor inspectors, grants data integrity and immutability, relies on tamper-proof time stamps for any recorded activity, allows the implementation of Smart Contracts where clauses are automatically respected without the need of a trusted control authority, acknowledges the legal requirements in the field, including the possibility of creating an Operational Safety Plans, which construction companies have to provide, and finally implements the creation of vacant job positions that workers can find and apply to. In order to achieve these goals, we adopt the Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering (BOSE) methodology to design Blockchain software applications and apply an Agile methodology centered on Blockchain Software development (called ABCDE) for the design and development of the decentralized application. Such a methodology allows us to center the software development around the actors of the system in the specific domain, such as Building Workers, Construction Companies, Labor Inspectors, and so on. In addition, we rely on the software sustainability analysis, based on the five dimensions of sustainability, to evaluate the approach and to avoid mistakes in the system development. We design system elements with specific diagrams, and we divided our system in the on-chain and the out-of-chain components. The implementation of the system, done by using Ethereum and the ERC721 standard, allows us to improve some aspect of the design, to know the deployment and usage costs, and to evaluate the effect of the user interface. Finally, we discuss the effects of our system and its sustainability, and we provide a comparison of our system with a similar per aims but centralized system.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Use Case Diagrammentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sustainability Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Design of a Sustainable Blockchain-Oriented Software for Building Workers Management

et al. 2020

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“…The approach to the construction of the application takes inspiration from tools such as Lorikeet and Caterpillar that derive Solidity implementations from models of the contract realized with the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) (Tran et al, 2018;Di Ciccio et al, 2019) and from the idea, illustrated in Marchesi et al (2018) of modeling the needed interaction by use cases and deriving a domain model from the description of the elements touched upon in the cases themselves. In our approach, we define a Use Case model to identify the actors and their interactions with the system, and the BPMN model to define the overall coordination and message exchange to be realized.…”

Section: Intelligent Smart Contracts For Supply Chain Coordinationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intelligent Smart Contracts for Innovative Supply Chain Management

et al. 2020

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We propose blockchains and smart contracts as enabling technologies for an innovative type of supply chain management, with the goal of achieving higher levels of collaboration between the companies participating in the chain, which in turn pays in the form of higher levels of profitability and economic health for the participating enterprises. Our proposal goes far beyond simply using blockchains as decentralized systems to track the origin and delivery of goods, which is what most of the current blockchain projects on supply chains are focused on. In fact, we introduce a type of smart contract aimed to solve two of the main problems that hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chains, namely trust and coordination. Solving the problem of trust amounts to the capability of establishing quickly and cheaply contractual relationships based on convergent business needs among parties that may not know each other, and therefore need to protect themselves from opportunistic or incorrect behavior. Solving the problem of coordination consists in creating, at convenient management costs, a control system capable of directing the objectives of the supply chain as a whole, so as to achieve a greater common good in the medium term, as an alternative to the state of affairs in which each participant pursues, on its own behalf, lower but immediate returns. Our smart contracts for innovative supply chain management replace human coordinators in tackling the problems above, thus eliminating one major obstacle to their effective solution, namely the need to trust the coordinator itself. Furthermore, in this way, by automating the process of coordination, they unburden the supply chain of a considerable management cost. Contracts of this kind not only automate contract execution as in standard smart contracts, but also adjust costs and compensations of the members of a supply chain, effectively taking up the role that was of human coordinators. Thus, we refer to them as “intelligent smart contracts.” In the course of the paper, we will illustrate an innovative supply chain architecture based on intelligent smart contracts running on blockchain, we will detail the algorithmic methodologies underlying the decision-making process of these contracts and we will outline the wider socio-economic perspectives opened by our approach.

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Ensuring transparency and traceability of food local products: A blockchain application to a Smart Tourism Region

Baralla

Pinna

Tonelli

et al. 2020

Concurrency and Computation

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Summary This article proposes a blockchain oriented platform to guarantee the origin and provenance of food items in a Smart Tourism Region context. Local food and beverage, in fact, can become a good combination to attract tourist and to promote the area provided that their provenance is clearly certified. We designed and developed a blockchain‐based system to manage an agri‐food supply chain for tracking food items. By using smart contracts the platform guarantees transparency, efficiency and trustworthiness. Our system is particularly suitable to manage cold chain since the system interfaces with IoT network devices providing detailed information about data monitoring food such as storage temperature, environment humidity, and GPS data. All involved actors can share data and information in a more efficient, transparent, and tamper proof way than traditional systems. The final consumer can access with transparency to all the agri‐food chain of the purchased product and verify provenance by retrieving all detailed information registered in the blockchain public ledger. The proposed system has been designed according to the ABCDE method, an agile development process recently conceived, to obtain a higher software quality to design a general blockchain system by means software engineering practices. A real case study applied to local products from Sardinia, Italy, is proposed at the end of the article.

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An Agile Software Engineering Method to Design Blockchain Applications

Cited by 73 publications

References 10 publications

Design of a Sustainable Blockchain-Oriented Software for Building Workers Management

Design of a Sustainable Blockchain-Oriented Software for Building Workers Management

Intelligent Smart Contracts for Innovative Supply Chain Management

Ensuring transparency and traceability of food local products: A blockchain application to a Smart Tourism Region

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