Powering software sustainability with blockchain

Abstract

Software sustainability is a systematic challenge that impacts broad segments of software systems. Software codebases must evolve overtime to address changing contexts and adapt to the flux in middlewares and platforms. In the process, it accumulates arbitrary complexities and its maintenance becomes progressively difficult. Current sustainability approaches focus on the symptoms and tend to be reactive in nature, and ignore the fundamental incentive structures that drive decision-making processes. Moreover, contemporary approaches are insensitive to the uniqueness of each software project context and operate on the assumption that sustainability measurements are universally applicable to the majority of software systems. This paper introduces a fundamentally novel peer-driven approach to managing software sustainability. The methodology ensures that software teams can define their own sustainability measures that adequately address the unique context of their project and its priorities. These measures are dynamically defined by the project peers to ensure their applicability as the project context evolves. Finally, the paper introduces Susereum, a blockchain platform that materializes the methodology and establishes novel incentive structures to systematically promote software sustainability throughout the project lifecycle.