Using Software Product Lines to Create Blockchain Products: Application to Supply Chain Traceability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a software product line approach and a web platform to simplify and accelerate the development of blockchain applications, specifically for supply chain traceability, improving quality and reducing time to market.

Contribution

It presents a novel platform that models, configures, and generates blockchain applications using software product line engineering, a first in this domain.

Findings

Platform successfully reproduces existing blockchain traceability applications

Using SPL improves application quality and development speed

First evidence of SPL benefits in blockchain application development

Abstract

In recent years, blockchain has been growing rapidly from a niche technology to a promising solution for many sectors, due to its unique properties that empower the design of innovative applications. Nevertheless, the development of blockchain applications is still a challenge. Due to the technological novelty, only a few developers are familiar with blockchain technologies and smart contracts. Others might face a steep learning curve or difficulties to reuse existing code to build blockchain applications. This study proposes a novel approach to tackle these issues, through software product line engineering. To support the approach, a web platform to configure and generate a blockchain application for on-chain traceability is introduced. First, a feature model has been designed to model core features of the chosen domain, based on the existing literature. Then, a configurator has been implemented to support the feature selection phase. Finally, a generator is able to ingest such configurations to generate on-the-shelf blockchain products. The generalizability of the contribution is validated by reproducing on-chain traceability applications proposed in the literature by using the platform. This work provides the first evidence that the implementation of blockchain applications using software product lines enhances the quality of produced applications and reduces the time to market.