A SYSTEMATIC MAPPING STUDY ON DEVELOPMENT OF BLOCKCHAIN-BASED SMART CONTRACTS

Context - Blockchain-based smart contracts have drawn the attention of scientific communities and businesses in recent years. The development of blockchain-based smart contracts is different from the development of conventional software due to the blockchain characteristics such as immutability, trustlessness, being append-only, and being decentralized. Therefore, standard software engineering processes need to be adjusted to address the unique characteristics of blockchain. Objective - This thesis aims to create a structured map of current research on the development of blockchain-based smart contracts, with a focus on identifying and classifying the development phases. Method - To accomplish our objective, we carried out a systematic mapping study on blockchain-based smart contract development. Our search yielded 1257 potentially related studies that were subjected to a selection process. Subsequently, in the final set appeared 41 primary studies. Result - Our main findings after analysis of the data are as follow: (i) researches mainly contribute to methods and providing tools, (ii) a large number of workshop papers indicate smart contracts' high acceptance rate, (iii) there is a lack of research on the finalization as a development phase, (iv) there is no common or standard language for specifying smart contracts that are valid regardless of the blockchain platform, (v) the most common language paradigm for smart contracts specification is imperative/declarative and for smart contracts implementation is declarative, (vi) the research community has put too much effort into the Ethereum blockchain, while it requires putting more attention to other blockchains, and (vii) there is a lack of studies tackling trustworthy oracle and scam challenges. conclusion - These results can benefit the research community to identify trends, constraints, and research gaps. In addition, they share potential directions for future research.