Modern Software Lifecycle Management leveraging the power of Blockchain

Abstract

Many distributed ledger technologies (DLT) offer smart contract platforms, that are already used in various industries such as healthcare, transportation, government, banking, and insurance. Software Lifecycle Management (SLM) is another area where DLT and smart contract platforms could play an important role in the future. SLM processes are covering the initial setup, technical and business configuration and ongoing maintenance of software systems that often consist of many cloud services, on-premise servers, and/or edge devices, spread on many geographical locations. In SLM there are many participants that should communicate each other to achieve common goal, for example the software provisioning. In case something wrong happens in their communication, it is very hard to prove what is the reason and which party failed to deliver, since the environment is complex and the protocols of responsibilities are not bound to the software dependencies. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how DLT-based smart contract platforms supports SLM processes for complex business systems where various participants are involved.