ABCDE -- Agile Block Chain Dapp Engineering

Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. The feeling of many software engineers about such huge interest in Blockchain technologies is that of unruled and hurried software development, a sort of competition on a first-come-first-served basis which does not assure neither software quality, nor that the basic concepts of software engineering are taken into account. This paper tries to cope with this issue, proposing a software development process to gather the requirement, analyze, design, develop, test and deploy Blockchain applications. The process is based on several Agile practices, such as User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. However, it makes also use of more formal notations, such as some UML diagrams describing the design of the system, with additions to represent specific concepts found in Blockchain development. The method is described in good detail, and an example is given to show how it works.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 8 table

The ICO Phenomenon and Its Relationships with Ethereum Smart Contract Environment

Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are public offers of new cryptocurrencies in exchange of existing ones, aimed to finance projects in the blockchain development arena. In the last 8 months of 2017, the total amount gathered by ICOs exceeded 4 billion US$, and overcame the venture capital funnelled toward high tech initiatives in the same period. A high percentage of ICOS is managed through Smart Contracts running on Ethereum blockchain, and in particular to ERC-20 Token Standard Contract. In this work we examine 1388 ICOs, published on December 31, 2017 on icobench.com Web site, gathering information relevant to the assessment of their quality and software development management, including data on their development teams. We also study, at the same date, the financial data of 450 ICO tokens available on coinmarketcap.com Web site, among which 355 tokens are managed on Ethereum blochain. We define success criteria for the ICOs, based on the funds actually gathered, and on the behavior of the price of the related tokens, finding the factors that most likely influence the ICO success likeliness

Software Engineering Practices applied to Blockchain Technology and Decentralized Applications

Blockchain software development is becoming more and more important for any modern software developer and IT startup. Nonetheless, blockchain software production still lacks a disciplined, organized and mature development process. The goal of my research is to study innovative software engineering techniques applicable to the development of blockchain applications. I focused on the use of agile practices, because these are suitable for developing systems whose requirements are not fully understood from the beginning, or tend to change, as is the case with most blockchain-based applications. In particular, I contributed to the proposal of a method to guide software development, called ABCDE, meaning Agile BlockChain Dapp Engineering. It takes into account the substantial difference between developing traditional software and developing smart contracts, and separates the two activities. It considers the software integration among the blockchain components and the off-chain components, which all together constitute a complete dApp system. The method also addresses specific activities for both security assessment and gas optimization, two of the main issues of dApp development, through systematic use of patterns and checklists. Agile methodologies aim to reduce software development risk, however, the risk of project failure or time and budget overruns is still a relevant problem. Therefore, I studied and developed a new approach to model some key risk factors in agile development, using software process simulation modeling (SPSM). The approach includes modeling the agile process, gathering data from the tool used for project management, and performing Monte Carlo simulations of the process, to get insights about the expected time and effort to complete the project, and about their distributions. While the simulator hasn't been specifically applied to blockchain projects yet, it has all the features to be able to do so. I also proposed an evaluation framework to compare public and permissioned blockchains, specifically suited for industrial applications. Then, I presented a complete solution based on Ethereum to implement a decentralized application, putting together in an original way components and patterns already used and proved. The proposed approach has the same transparency and immutability of a public blockchain, largely reducing its drawbacks. The key reason to use a blockchain is trust. There is a growing demand for transparency across the agri-food supply chain from customers and governments. The adoption of blockchain technology to enable secure traceability for the agri-food supply chain management, provide information such as the provenance of a food product, and prevent food fraud, is rapidly emerging. However, developing correct smart contracts for these use cases is still more of a challenge. My research also focused on defining a novel approach for easily customizing and composing general Ethereum-based smart contracts designed for the agri-food industrial domain, to be able to reuse the code and modules and automate the process to shorten the time of development, keeping it secure and trusted. Starting from the definition of the real production process, I aimed to automatically generate both the smart contracts to manage the system and the user interfaces to interact with them, thus producing a working system in a semi-automated way. Another supply chain in which blockchain technology can be applied with potential advantages is the shipping logistics. With the support of SWOT analysis, I explored the application prospects and the practical impacts, benefits, pros and cons, economic and technical barriers related to the use of Blockchain to support the creation of an interport community. Finally, I included in this thesis, albeit marginally, a research to the study of techniques for the forecasting of time series, in particular to forecast daily closing price series of different cryptocurrencies

The ICO phenomenon and its relationships with Ethereum Smart Contract environment

Initial Coin Offerings (ICO) are public offers of new cryptocurrencies in exchange of existing ones, aimed to finance projects in the blockchain development arena. In the last 8 months of 2017, the total amount gathered by ICOs exceeded 4 billion US$, and overcame the venture capital funnelled toward high tech initiatives in the same period. A high percentage of ICOs is managed through Smart Contracts running on Ethereum blockchain, and in particular to ERC-20 Token Standard Contract. In this work we examine 1387 ICOs, published on December 31, 2017 on icobench.com website, gathering information relevant to the assessment of their quality and software development management, including data on their development teams. We also study, at the same date, the financial data of 450 ICO tokens available on coinmarketcap.com website, among which 355 tokens are managed on Ethereum blochain. We define success criteria for the ICOs, based on the funds actually gathered, and on the behavior of the price of the related tokens, finding the factors that most likely influence the ICO success likeliness

Can the Blockchain Facilitate the Development of an Interport Community?

Seaports are part of a complex and information-intensive maritime supply chain that includes a set of organizations and operators who need to exchange a large amount of information and data with each other. As supply chains become increasingly integrated and connected, the connectivity of stakeholders must be ensured not only within individual ports but also between ports. This paper explores the application prospects and practical implications of the application of Blockchain technology for the establishment of an interport community within which different ports organized as a network can exchange information and data in a secure and effective way. With the support of SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis, this paper addresses several research questions concerning the practical impacts, benefits, pros and cons, economic and technical barriers related to the implementation of Blockchain technology to support the creation of an interport community

Application Prospects of Blockchain Technology to Support the Development of Interport Communities

A key aspect for the efficiency and security of maritime transport is linked to the associated information flows. The optimal management of maritime transport requires the sharing of data in real-time between the various participating organizations. Moreover, as supply chains become increasingly integrated, the connectivity of stakeholders must be ensured not only within the single port but also between ports. Blockchain could offer interesting opportunities in this regard and is believed to have a huge impact on the future of the digitization of the port and maritime industry. This document analyzes the state of art and practice of blockchain applications in the maritime industry and explores the application prospects and practical implications of blockchain for building an interport community. The paper uses SWOT analysis to address several research questions concerning the practical impacts and barriers related to the implementation of blockchain technology in port communities and develops a Proof of Concept (PoC) to concretely show how blockchain technology can be applied to roll-on roll-off transport and interport communities in real environments. In this regard, this study intends to contribute to the sector literature by providing a detailed framework that describes how to proceed to choose the correct blockchain scheme and implement the various management and operational aspects of an interport community by benefiting from the blockchain