Generating Trusted Coordination of Collaborative Software Development Using Blockchain

The coordination of developing various complex and large-scale projects using computers has been well established and is the so-called computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Collaborative software development consists of a group of teams working together to achieve a common goal for developing a high-quality, complex, and large-scale software system efficiently, and it requires common processes and communication channels among these teams. The common processes for coordination among software development teams can be handled by similar principles in CSCW. The development of complex and large-scale software becomes complicated due to the involvement of many software development teams. The development of such a software system can be largely improved by effective collaboration among the participating software development teams at both software components and system levels. The efficiency of developing software components depends on trusted coordination among the participating teams for sharing, processing, and managing information on various participating teams, which are often operating in a distributed environment. Participating teams may belong to the same organization or different organizations. Existing approaches to coordination in collaborative software development are based on using a centralized repository to store, process, and retrieve information on participating software development teams during the development. These approaches use a centralized authority, have a single point of failure, and restricted rights to own data and software. In this thesis, the generation of trusted coordination in collaborative software development using blockchain is studied, and an approach to achieving trusted cooperation for collaborative software development using blockchain is presented. The smart contracts are created in the blockchain to encode software specifications and acceptance criteria for the software results generated by participating teams. The blockchain used in the approach is a private blockchain because a private blockchain has the characteristics of providing non-repudiation, privacy, and integrity, which are required in trusted coordination of collaborative software development. This approach is implemented using Hyperledger, an open-source private blockchain. An example to illustrate the approach is also given.