Investigating Software Testing and Maintenance of Open-Source Distributed Ledger

A distributed ledger is the backbone of all blockchain solutions. It provides a shared database spreading across a network of nodes. The number of DL solutions and their implementations has grown in recent years. Besides the architectural and performance promises of thesesolutions, organizations see...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cvitic, Petya Hristova, Dobslaw, Felix, de Oliveira Neto, Francisco Gomes
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
blockchain
Computer Systems
Correlation
Datorsystem
Distributed ledger
Inspection
Maintenance engineering
Manuals
Organizations
software maintenance
software testing
System testing
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Summary:A distributed ledger is the backbone of all blockchain solutions. It provides a shared database spreading across a network of nodes. The number of DL solutions and their implementations has grown in recent years. Besides the architectural and performance promises of thesesolutions, organizations seekingto implement DL also need to consider the overall quality of the software available and its ecosystem. Particularly, previous research has identified the need to better understand the testing and maintenance practices behind these types of technologies. This paper investigates the testing and maintenance of 18 different open-source projects that implement distributed ledgers. We perform a manual inspection of test artefacts and mine the history of commits, issues and contributors of the chosen projects to understand the landscape of testing and maintenance in these projects. Our findings suggest that unit and integration tests are present in most projects, they do not follow a holistic system testing approach. Moreover, projects rely on a small team of core contributors (5 on average). While the projects are continuously maintained, larger changes are uncommon. Our results can be used for benchmarking and pinpointing areas of improvement for the development of distributed ledgers.
ISSN:2833-9061
2640-7574
DOI:10.1109/SANER56733.2023.00107