Investigating Software Testing and Maintenance of Open-Source Distributed Ledger

A distributed ledger is the backbone of all blockchain solutions. It provides a shared database spreading across a network of nodes. The number of DL solutions and their implementations has grown in recent years. Besides the architectural and performance promises of thesesolutions, organizations seekingto implement DL also need to consider the overall quality of the software available and its ecosystem. Particularly, previous research has identified the need to better understand the testing and maintenance practices behind these types of technologies. This paper investigates the testing and maintenance of 18 different open-source projects that implement distributed ledgers. We perform a manual inspection of test artefacts and mine the history of commits, issues and contributors of the chosen projects to understand the landscape of testing and maintenance in these projects. Our findings suggest that unit and integration tests are present in most projects, they do not follow a holistic system testing approach. Moreover, projects rely on a small team of core contributors (5 on average). While the projects are continuously maintained, larger changes are uncommon. Our results can be used for benchmarking and pinpointing areas of improvement for the development of distributed ledgers.

I. Introduction

Distributed Ledgers (DL) keep record and sync transactional data across a network of nodes [1]. DL’s provide transparency, tamper-resistance (it is hard for a single party to unilaterally change past records), and auditability of ledger information [1]. These key features make DL a potential solution to enhanced security, reliability, transparency, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of information processing [2] as well as decreased centralization [1].