Decision Support for Blockchain Platform Selection: Three Industry Case Studies

Abstract

Blockchain technology has received significant attention recently, as it offers a reliable decentralized infrastructure for all kinds of business transactions. Software-producing organizations are increasingly considering blockchain technology for inclusion into their software products. Selecting the best fitting blockchain platform requires the assessment of its functionality, adaptability, and compatibility to the existing software product. Novice software developers and architects are not experts in every domain, so they should either consult external experts or acquire knowledge themselves. The decision-making process gets more complicated as the number of decision-makers, alternatives, and criteria increases. Hence, a decision model is required to externalize and organize knowledge regarding the blockchain platform selection context. Recently, we designed a decision support system to use such decision models to support decision-makers with their technology selection problems in software production. In this article, we introduce a decision model for the blockchain platform selection problem. The decision model has been evaluated through three real-world case studies at three software-producing organizations. The case-study participants asserted that the approach provides significantly more insight into the blockchain platform selection process, provides a richer prioritized option list than if they had done their research independently, and reduces the time and cost of the decision-making process.

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