On the impact of architecture design decisions on the quality of blockchain-based applications

In software architectures, architectural design decisions (ADDs) strongly influence the quality of the resulting software system. Wrong decisions lead to low-quality systems and are difficult to repair later on in the development process. As of today, little is known about the impact of certain ADDs for the development of architectures for blockchain-based systems. Thus, it is difficult to predict the outcome of certain ADDs when developing architectures for such systems. In the following, we propose a simulation-based approach for blockchain architectures in which the impact of certain ADDs on certain quality attributes can be simulated. To this end, we first implemented a simulation environment for blockchain architectures. The simulation environment was then used to execute a series of experiments from which we derived a set of hypotheses about the impact of certain ADDs on quality attributes for blockchain architectures. Finally, we tested the hypotheses using statistical analyses and derived an empirical model for blockchain architectures based on the outcome of the analysis. The model can be used by architects to predict the effect of certain decisions in the design of blockchain architectures before implementing them.