Initial coin offerings and agile practices

Abstract

An ICO (Initial Coin Offering) is an innovative way to fund projects based on blockchain. The funding is based on the selling of tokens by means of decentralized applications called smart contracts written in Solidity, a programming language specific for Ethereum blockchain. The ICOs work in a volatile context and it is crucial that the team is capable of handling constant changes. The Agile methods, proven practices enabling to develop software in presence of changing requirements, could be a means for managing uncertainty. The main goals of this work are to understand software engineering activities related to ICOs, recognize the ICOs developed using Agile methods, and make a comparison between ICOs and Agile ICOs. In addition, we perform a deeper analysis of Agile ICOs concerning project planning, software development, and code features. Our work shows that the roles of the people involved in an ICO can be compared to the typical roles of the SCRUM methodology. The majority of Agile ICOs use tool of testing before storing smart contract on blockchain. Finally, the application of volumetric and complexity software metrics shows that the files of Agile ICOs is on average shorter and less complex than in other smart contracts.