Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there any differences between smart contract development and traditional software development? What kind of challenges are faced by developers during smart contract development? Questions like these are important but have not been explored by researchers yet. In this paper, we performed an exploratory study to understand the current state and potential challenges developers are facing in developing smart contracts on blockchains, with a focus on Ethereum (the most popular public blockchain platform for smart contracts). Toward this end, we conducted this study in two phases. In the first phase, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 developers from GitHub and industry professionals who are working on smart contracts. In the second phase, we performed a survey on 232 practitioners to validate the findings from the interviews. Our interview and survey results revealed several major challenges developers are facing during smart contract development: (1) there is no effective way to guarantee the security of smart contract code; (2) existing tools for development are still very basic; (3) the programming languages and the virtual machines still have a number of limitations; (4) performance problems are hard to handle under resource constrained running environment; and (5) online resources (including advanced/updated documents and community support) are still limited. Our study suggests several directions that researchers and practitioners can work on to help improve developers’ experience on developing high-quality smart contracts.
Thu 9 JulDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
08:05 - 09:05 | I17-Contracts and AnalysisDemonstrations / Technical Papers / Software Engineering in Practice / Journal First at Goguryeo Chair(s): Jaechang Nam Handong Global University | ||
08:05 10mTalk | How to reduce risk effectively in fixed price software developmentSEIP Software Engineering in Practice | ||
08:15 10mTalk | Seraph: Enabling Cross-Platform Security Analysis For EVM and WASM Smart ContractsDemo Demonstrations Zhiqiang Yang Oxford-Hainan Blockchain Research Institute, Han Liu Tsinghua University, Yue Li Oxford-Hainan Blockchain Research Institute, Huixuan Zheng Oxford-Hainan Blockchain Research Institute, Lei Wang Oxford-Hainan Blockchain Research Institute, Bangdao Chen Oxford-Hainan Blockchain Research Institute | ||
08:25 10mTalk | Escape from Escape Analysis of GolangSEIP Software Engineering in Practice Cong Wang Tsinghua University, Mingrui Zhang Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Yu Jiang , Huafeng Zhang Huawei Technologies, Hangzhou, China, Zhenchang Xing Australia National University, Ming Gu | ||
08:35 10mTalk | Smart Contract Development: Challenges and OpportunitiesJ1 Journal First Weiqin Zou Nanjing University, David Lo Singapore Management University, Pavneet Singh Kochhar Microsoft, Xuan-Bach D. Le Singapore Management University, Singapore, Xin Xia Monash University, Yang Feng Nanjing University, Zhenyu Chen Nanjing University, Baowen Xu Nanjing University | ||
08:45 10mTalk | Empirical Review of Automated Analysis Tools on 47,587 Ethereum Smart Contracts Technical Papers Thomas Durieux KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, João F. Ferreira INESC-ID and IST, University of Lisbon, Rui Abreu Instituto Superior Técnico, U. Lisboa & INESC-ID, Pedro Cruz IST, University of Lisbon, Portugal Pre-print | ||
08:55 10mTalk | An Extended Abstract of “METRIC+: A Metamorphic Relation Identification Technique Based on Input Plus Output Domains”J1 Journal First Chang-ai Sun University of Science and Technology Beijing, An Fu University of Science and Technology Beijing, Pak-Lok Poon School of Engineering & Technology, Central Queensland University, Australia, Xiaoyuan Xie School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China, Huai Liu Swinburne University of Technology, Tsong Yueh Chen Swinburne University of Technology | ||