Functional suitability assessment of smart contracts: A survey and first proposal

Abstract

Blockchain is a cross-cutting technology allowing interactions among untrusted entities in a distributed manner without the need for involving a trusted third party. Smart contracts (i.e., programs running on the blockchain) enabled organizations to envision and implement solutions to real-world problems in less cost and time. Given the immutability of blockchain and the lack of best practices for properly designing and developing smart contracts, it is crucial to assure smart contract quality before deployment. With the help of an exploratory survey involving developers and researchers, this paper identifies the practices and tools used to develop, implement, and evaluate smart contracts. The survey received 55 valid responses. Such responses indicate that (i) inefficiencies may occur during the development cycle of a smart contract, especially regarding requirements specification, design, and testing phases, and (ii) the lack of a shared standard to evaluate the functional quality of implemented smart contracts. To start coping with these issues, the adoption of functional suitability assessment measures recommended by the ISO/IEC 25000 standard, widely used in software engineering, is proposed by adapting them to the context of smart contracts. Through some examples, the manuscript also illustrates how to measure the functional completeness and correctness of smart contracts. The proposed procedure to measure smart contract functional suitability brings advantages to both developers and users of decentralized finance or non-fungible tokens platforms, data marketplaces, or shipping and real estate services, just to mention a few. In particular, it helps (i) better outline the responsibilities of smart contracts, (ii) uncover errors and deficiencies of smart contracts in the early stages, and (iii) ensure that the established requirements are met.