Trustworthy and collaborative traceability management: Experts’ feedback on a blockchain-enabled framework

Abstract

Blockchain technology has attracted significant attention in both academia and industry. Recently, the application of blockchain has been advocated in software engineering. The global software engineering paradigm exacerbates trust issues, as distributed and cross-organizational teams need to share software artifacts. In such a context, there is a need for a decentralized yet reliable traceability knowledge base to keep track of what/how/when/by whom software artifacts were created or changed. This study presents a blockchain-enabled framework for trustworthy and collaborative traceability management and identifies benefits, challenges, and potential improvements based on the feedback of software engineering experts. A qualitative approach was followed in this study through semistructured interviews with software engineering (SE) experts. Transcripts were analyzed by applying the content analysis technique. The results indicated the emergence of five categories, further grouped into three main categories: experts' perceptions, blockchain-based software process improvement, and experts' recommendations. In addition, the findings suggested four archetypes of organizations that may be interested in blockchain technology: distributed organizations, organizations with contract-based projects, organizations in regulated domains, and regulators who may push the use of this technology. Further efforts should be devoted to the integration of the proposal with tools used throughout the software development lifecycle and leveraging the potential of smart contracts in validating the implementation of requirements automatically.