Assessing the Maturity of Blockchain-Based Implementations with Software Reliability Growth Models

Blockchain technology is widely used in healthcare, IoT, smart grids, autonomous vehicles, and so on to improve security, trust, transparency, and reliability in handling data. However, Blockchain-Based Implementations (BBIs) remain a complex and challenging task for the developers, especially when ensuring quality across multiple nodes. Despite the growing popularity of BBIs, the existing literature lacks a way to establish quality standards for blockchain development. To tackle this issue, we propose a conceptual model that uses Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) to assess the code-based maturity of BBIs. The proposed model analyzes reports from different software releases to compare current versions with previous ones. We evaluate well-known BBI platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, using bug reports collected from the tracking management system. By applying SRGMs to these reports, we identify factors like fault propagation and remaining bugs, helping to predict testing needs for future releases and identifying areas potentially affected by bugs. We assess software reliability based on bug resolution parameters and establish software maturity metrics to evaluate release completeness by reporting remaining bugs in current and upcoming releases. The results reveal that the proposed conceptual model is effective in empirically assessing the reliability of BBIs.