Evaluating Ethereum development environments

Abstract

Blockchain technology has been one of the hottest buzzwords in the early 2020s and one of the main reasons for that is the interest towards decentralized applications, which use the smart contracts located in the blockchain to serve the application’s business logic. Ethereum is the biggest platform for decentralized applications, and this study focuses on exploring what kind of support developers need for developing Ethereum based products. This is done by first examining the state of the art by conducting a semi-systematic literature review, followed by using a customized DESMET evaluation method, in which the requirements are mapped as features along with the evaluation criteria, to see how well the currently popular Ethereum development environments provide support for the developers. A total of three development environments by the names of Hardhat, Truffle, and Brownie are evaluated, and the achieved results are analysed to find the differences in the level of support they offer for the developers. At the end the findings of the study are summarized, the experiences from the customized DESMET evaluation method are reported, the validity towards the achieved results are inspected, and the possible directions to continue the work is discussed.