Date: Thursday June 4, 2020

 

Time:  1:00pm – 2:00pm

 

 

Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) introduces a new computing paradigm that is viewed by experts as a disruptive and revolutionary technology. While bitcoin is the most well-known successful application of blockchain technology, many other applications and sectors could successfully utilize the power of blockchain. The potential applications of blockchain beyond finance and banking encouraged many organizations to integrate and adopt blockchain into existing or new software systems. Integrating and using any new computing paradigm is expected to affect the best practice and design principles of building software systems. Emerging blockchain-based applications require careful attention to many functional and nonfunctional requirements. One common practice in software engineering to handle potential pitfalls in software systems is using design patterns. Design patterns have been long used in software development to optimize the quality of software being developed. However, design patterns have not seen widespread adoption in blockchain applications and smart contracts. This research aims to determine the usefulness of design patterns in blockchain-based applications and how the adoption of design patterns can be improved. This is achieved in a two-step process. Firstly, the quality of open-source blockchain-based applications developed with design patterns is compared with projects without design patterns. In the next step, two versions of a blockchain-based application for cheque clearance are developed, with and without design patterns, and their quality, performance, and vulnerability to attacks are compared.

 

Keywords: blockchains, distributed ledger technology, ethereum, design patterns, software engineering

 

 

 

Internal Reader: Dr. Pooya Moradian Zadeh, School of Computer Science

 

External Reader: Dr. William Anderson, Cross Border Institute

 

Advisor: Dr. Sherif Saad Ahmed, School of Computer Science