Maintaining Smart Contracts on Ethereum: Issues, Techniques, and Future Challenges
Jiachi Chen, Xin Xia, David Lo, John Grundy, Xiaohu Yang

TL;DR
This paper investigates the unique maintenance challenges of Ethereum smart contracts, analyzing literature and developer feedback to identify issues, current methods, and future research directions for post-deployment maintenance.
Contribution
It provides the first empirical study on smart contract maintenance, combining literature review and developer survey to address post-deployment issues and methods.
Findings
Identified key maintenance issues for smart contracts on Ethereum.
Analyzed current maintenance techniques used by developers.
Highlighted future research directions for improving smart contract maintenance.
Abstract
Software development is a very broad activity that captures the entire life cycle of a software, which includes designing, programming, maintenance and so on. In this study, we focus on the maintenance-related concerns of the post-deployment of smart contracts. Smart contracts are self-executed programs that run on a blockchain. They cannot be modified once deployed and hence they bring unique maintenance challenges compared to conventional software. According to the definition of ISO/IEC 14764, there are four kinds of software maintenance, i.e., corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance. This study aims to answer (i) What kinds of issues will smart contract developers encounter for corrective, adaptive, perfective, and preventive maintenance after they are deployed to the Ethereum? (ii) What are the current maintenance-related methods used for smart contracts? To…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
