Blockchain Developer Experience: A Multivocal Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews existing literature on Blockchain Developer Experience (BcDEx), highlighting the dominance of gray literature and identifying key focus areas such as usability, multi-network support, and developer productivity.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive mapping of academic and industry efforts on BcDEx through a multivocal literature review, revealing research gaps and key focus areas.

Findings

Gray literature dominates BcDEx sources

Development efficiency and usability are primary focus areas

BcDEx is shaped by five key perspectives

Abstract

The rise of smart contracts has expanded blockchain's capabilities, enabling the development of innovative decentralized applications (dApps). However, this advancement brings its own challenges, including the management of distributed architectures and immutable data. Addressing these complexities requires a specialized approach to software engineering, with blockchain-oriented practices emerging to support development in this domain. Developer Experience (DEx) is central to this effort, focusing on the usability, productivity, and overall satisfaction of tools and frameworks from the engineers' perspective. Despite its importance, research on Blockchain Developer Experience (BcDEx) remains limited, with no systematic mapping of academic and industry efforts. To bridge this gap, we conducted a Multivocal Literature Review analyzing 62 to understand the distribution of BcDEx sources, practical implementations, and their impact. Our findings revealed that academic focus on BcDEx is limited compared to the coverage in gray literature, which primarily includes blogs (41.8%) and corporate sources (21.8%). Particularly, development efficiency, multi-network support, and usability are the most addressed aspects in tools and frameworks. In addition, we found that BcDEx is being shaped through five key perspectives: complexity abstraction, adoption facilitation, productivity enhancement, developer education, and BcDEx evaluation.