A critical review on blockchain assessment initiatives: A technology evolution viewpoint

Ricardo Colomo‐Palacios, Mary Sánchez‐Gordón, Daniel Arias‐Aranda
2020 Journal of Software: Evolution and Process  
Blockchain is considered as a major emerging technology that is having an everincreasing spread both in industrial and academic contexts. As the usage of blockchain keeps increasing, a fourth generation of blockchain platforms is being proposed. Thus, applications of blockchain have evolved towards wider scopes than cryptocurrency and asset management. In this context, it is important for practitioners to have deep understanding of various blockchain assessment initiatives. Therefore, this work
more » ... discusses blockchain assessment initiatives from a technology evolution viewpoint. Furthermore, a mapping was conducted to identify factors that impact blockchain initiatives, synthesize available evidence, and identify gaps between relevant approaches available in the literature. As a result, nine selected works were analyzed based on applicability, research approach, assessment process, blockchain adoption process, and blockchain waves. The findings can help practitioners to understand the main assessment factors that undermine blockchain implementations. K E Y W O R D S blockchain, mapping, software change, technology assessment, technology evolution | INTRODUCTION Technology evolution is related to changes in a given technology over time. 1 The evolution of technology is an important aspect for various actors such as developers, designers, policy makers, or adopters in general. Information technology (IT) is nowadays one of the driving forces of progress, and the management of its evolution is crucial for greater and softer adoption of these technology. However, the rapid evolution of IT challenges several aspects of its governance including security or compliance, as well as traditional functions like acquisition, parametrization, development, and the deployment of systems. 2 Inside the broad field of IT, software and its engineering are currently a crucial aspect for almost all organizations. One of the inherent characteristics of software is change. Given that software systems and their circumstances evolve with time, change is inevitable in the software arena. 3 Moreover, changes in software are key to correct existing defects and to incorporate improvements according to varying requirements or changes in the environment. 4 Software change is a traditional topic in software engineering and the initial taxonomy of software changes incorporating corrective, adaptive, and perfective, defined by Swanson back in the seventies 5 evolved to the four kinds of changes defined in the ISO/IEC 14764, namely, corrective, adaptive, perfective, and, the new one, preventive. Perfective changes are the ones concerned to expand the existing requirements. According to Kim et al. 6 the internals of new feature additions in software are hard to define, and, as a consequence, they are understudied. In the current
doi:10.1002/smr.2272 fatcat:zrnurwf5kvfh3huisf6tv7njbi