An Agile Software Engineering Method to Design Blockchain Applications

Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all the software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. The feeling of many software engineers about such huge interest in Blockchain technologies is that of unruled and hurried software development, a sort of competition on a first-come-first-served basis which does not assure neither software quality, nor that the basic concepts of software engineering are taken into account. This paper tries to cope with this issue, proposing a software development process to gather the requirement, analyze, design, develop, test and deploy Blockchain applications. The process is based on several Agile practices, such as User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. However, it makes also use of more formal notations, such as some UML diagrams describing the design of the system, with additions to represent specific concepts found in Blockchain development. The method is described in good detail, and an example is given to show how it works.