On Comparing Software Quality Metrics of Traditional vs Blockchain-Oriented Software: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Driven by the surge of interest generated around blockchain technologies over the last years, a new category of systems, called Blockchain-Oriented Software (BOS), which are strictly tied to Blockchain distributed environment, has become increasingly popular. Yet, there is not a thorough understanding of their structure and behaviour and if and to which extent they differ from traditional software systems. The present work provide a first statistical characterisation of BOS. We analysed and compared 5 C++ open source Blockchain-Oriented and 5 Traditional Java software systems, aiming at detecting potential differences between the two categories of projects, and specifically in the statistical distribution of 10 software metrics. Although, in general, the statistical distributions for Traditional software and Blockchain software show similarities, the distribution of Average Cyclomatic and Ration Comment To Code metrics reveal significant differences in their queue, whereas the Number of Statements metric shows meaningful differences on the double Pareto distribution.