Blockchain for requirements traceability: A qualitative approach

Abstract

Blockchain technology has emerged as a “disruptive innovation” that has received significant attention in academic and organizational settings. However, most of the existing research is focused on technical issues of blockchain systems, overlooking the organizational perspective. This study adopted a grounded theory to unveil the blockchain implementation process in organizations from the lens of blockchain experts. The results revealed three main categories: key activities, success factors, and challenges related to blockchain implementation in organizations, the latter being identified as the core category, along with 17 other concepts. Findings suggested that the majority of blockchain projects stop at the pilot stage and outlined organizational resistance to change as the core challenge. According to the experts, the following factors contribute to the organizational resistance to change: innovation–production gap, conservative management, and centralized mentality. The study aims to contribute to the existing blockchain literature by providing a holistic and domain‐agnostic view of the blockchain implementation process in organizational settings. This can potentially encourage the development and implementation of blockchain solutions and guide practitioners who are interested in leveraging the inherent benefits of this technology. In addition, the results are used to improve a blockchain‐enabled requirements traceability framework proposed in our previous paper.

A Neural Blockchain for Requirements Traceability: BC4RT Prototype

“…The findings in P5 contributed to explaining the organizational resistance to change when implementing blockchain technology through the following factors: innovation-production gap, centralized mentality, and conservative management. These findings can enhance the understanding of the implementation process of blockchain technology in organizational settings which is a research area with limited empirical evidence, to date [174,190]. Moreover, the thesis contributed to the RT literature by providing a comprehensive and holistic overview of challenges that hinder the implementation of requirements traceability in practice (P2).…”

“…The interviews lasted from 40 to 95 minutes. Two different interview guide documents were designed with a set of pre-defined open-ended questions that can be accessed online [130,131]. In P5, the interviews aimed to uncover blockchain experts' opinions and experience related to the implementation process of blockchain technology in organizational settings.…”

“…To enable reproducibility and transparency, the analysis processes followed in this thesis (P2, P3, P5, P7) are documented in Figshare, as transparent reproducibility packages [126,127,130,131].…”

“…Although the studies did not handle sensitive data, they were submitted for approval to the Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD), prior to their execution. It is worthy to note that informed consent forms were created for each of the studies and they are available online in Figshare [130,131]. These forms consisted of detailed information regarding the rights of participants, such as voluntariness and anonymity, possible implications of participation in these studies, the purpose of the studies, motivations behind the selection of experts, information regarding data recording, storage and deletion, along with benefits and risks of the studies.…”

“…Therefore, it is important to provide evidence on how blockchain technology is implemented in organizational settings. The fifth study of this thesis [174] aims to shed light on the implementation process of blockchain technology from the lens of blockchain experts. The findings are used to improve a previously proposed blockchain framework [6].…”