Roberto Tonelli

Giacomo Ibba, Sabrina Aufiero, Silvia Bartolucci et al.

This paper presents MindTheDApp, a toolchain designed specifically for the structural analysis of Ethereum-based Decentralized Applications (DApps), with a distinct focus on a complex network-driven approach. Unlike existing tools, our toolchain combines the power of ANTLR4 and Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) traversal techniques to transform the architecture and interactions within smart contracts into a specialized bipartite graph. This enables advanced network analytics to highlight operational efficiencies within the DApp's architecture. The bipartite graph generated by the proposed tool comprises two sets of nodes: one representing smart contracts, interfaces, and libraries, and the other including functions, events, and modifiers. Edges in the graph connect functions to smart contracts they interact with, offering a granular view of interdependencies and execution flow within the DApp. This network-centric approach allows researchers and practitioners to apply complex network theory in understanding the robustness, adaptability, and intricacies of decentralized systems. Our work contributes to the enhancement of security in smart contracts by allowing the visualisation of the network, and it provides a deep understanding of the architecture and operational logic within DApps. Given the growing importance of smart contracts in the blockchain ecosystem and the emerging application of complex network theory in technology, our toolchain offers a timely contribution to both academic research and practical applications in the field of blockchain technology.

Matteo Esposito, Lodovica Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli et al.

Digital sovereignty has emerged as a central concern for modern software-intensive systems, driven by the dominance of non-sovereign cloud infrastructures, the rapid adoption of Generative AI, and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements. While existing initiatives address governance, compliance, and security in isolation, they provide limited guidance on how sovereignty can be operationalized at the architectural level. In this paper, we argue that sovereignty must be treated as a first-class architectural property rather than a purely regulatory objective. We introduce a Sovereign Reference Architecture that integrates self-sovereign identity, blockchain-based trust and auditability, sovereign data governance, and Generative AI deployed under explicit architectural control. The architecture explicitly captures the dual role of Generative AI as both a source of governance risk and an enabler of compliance, accountability, and continuous assurance when properly constrained. By framing sovereignty as an architectural quality attribute, our work bridges regulatory intent and concrete system design, offering a coherent foundation for building auditable, evolvable, and jurisdiction-aware AI-enabled systems. The proposed reference architecture provides a principled starting point for future research and practice at the intersection of software architecture, Generative AI, and digital sovereignty.

Giuseppe Destefanis, Marco Ortu, Steve Counsell et al.

In this paper, we present an analysis of more than 500K comments from open-source repositories of software systems. Our aim is to empirically determine how developers interact with each other under certain psychological conditions generated by politeness, sentiment and emotion expressed in developers' comments. Developers involved in open-source projects do not usually know each other; they mainly communicate through mailing lists, chat rooms, and tools such as issue tracking systems. The way in which they communicate affects the development process and the productivity of the people involved in the project. We evaluated politeness, sentiment, and emotions of comments posted by developers and studied the communication flow to understand how they interacted in the presence of impolite and negative comments (and vice versa). Our analysis shows that when in presence of impolite or negative comments, the probability of the next comment being impolite or negative is 14% and 25%, respectively; anger, however, has a probability of 40% of being followed by a further anger comment. The result could help managers take control the development phases of a system since social aspects can seriously affect a developer's productivity. In a distributed environment this may have a particular resonance.

Giuseppe Destefanis, Marco Ortu, Steve Counsell et al.

The summary presented in this paper highlights the results obtained in a four-years project aiming at analyzing the development process of software artifacts from two points of view: Effectiveness and Affectiveness. The first attribute is meant to analyze the productivity of the Open Source Communities by measuring the time required to resolve an issue, while the latter provides a novel approach for studying the development process by analyzing the affectiveness ex-pressed by developers in their comments posted during the issue resolution phase. Affectivenes is obtained by measuring Sentiment, Politeness and Emotions. All the study presented in this summary are based on Jira, one of the most used software repositories.

Giuseppe Antonio Pierro, Roberto Tonelli, Michele Marchesi

Many empirical software engineering studies show that there is a great need for repositories where source code is acquired, filtered and classified. During the last few years, Ethereum block explorer services have emerged as a popular project to explore and search Ethereum blockchain data such as transactions, addresses, tokens, smart-contracts' source code, prices and other activities taking place on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite the availability of this kind of services, retrieving specific information useful to empirical software engineering studies, such as the study of smart-contracts' software metrics might require many sub-tasks, such as searching specific transactions in a block, parsing files in HTML format and filtering the smart-contracts to remove duplicated code or unused smart-contracts. In this paper we afford this problem creating Smart Corpus', a Corpus of Smart Contracts in an organized reasoned and up to date repository where Solidity source code and other metadata about Ethereum smart contracts can easily and systematically be retrieved. We present the Smart Corpus' design and its initial implementation and we show how the data-set of smart contracts' source code in a variety of programming languages can be queried and processed, get useful information on smart contracts and their software metrics. The Smart Corpus aims to create a smart-contracts' repository where smart contracts data (source code, ABI and byte-code) are freely and immediately available and also classified based on the main software metrics identified in the scientific literature. Smart-contracts source code has been validated by EtherScan and each contract comes with its own associated software metrics as computed by the freely available software PASO. Moreover, Smart Corpus can be easily extended, as the number of new smart-contracts increases day by day.

Lodovica Marchesi, Michele Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli

Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. The feeling of many software engineers about such huge interest in Blockchain technologies is that of unruled and hurried software development, a sort of competition on a first-come-first-served basis which does not assure neither software quality, nor that the basic concepts of software engineering are taken into account. This paper tries to cope with this issue, proposing a software development process to gather the requirement, analyze, design, develop, test and deploy Blockchain applications. The process is based on several Agile practices, such as User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. However, it makes also use of more formal notations, such as some UML diagrams describing the design of the system, with additions to represent specific concepts found in Blockchain development. The method is described in good detail, and an example is given to show how it works.

Michele Marchesi, Lodovica Marchesi, Roberto Tonelli

Cryptocurrencies and their foundation technology, the Blockchain, are reshaping finance and economics, allowing a decentralized approach enabling trusted applications with no trusted counterpart. More recently, the Blockchain and the programs running on it, called Smart Contracts, are also finding more and more applications in all fields requiring trust and sound certifications. Some people have come to the point of saying that the "Blockchain revolution" can be compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all the software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. The feeling of many software engineers about such huge interest in Blockchain technologies is that of unruled and hurried software development, a sort of competition on a first-come-first-served basis which does not assure neither software quality, nor that the basic concepts of software engineering are taken into account. This paper tries to cope with this issue, proposing a software development process to gather the requirement, analyze, design, develop, test and deploy Blockchain applications. The process is based on several Agile practices, such as User Stories and iterative and incremental development based on them. However, it makes also use of more formal notations, such as some UML diagrams describing the design of the system, with additions to represent specific concepts found in Blockchain development. The method is described in good detail, and an example is given to show how it works.

Andrea Pinna, Roberto Tonelli, Matteo Orrú et al.

A Blockchain is a global shared infrastructure where cryptocurrency transactions among addresses are recorded, validated and made publicly available in a peer- to-peer network. To date the best known and important cryptocurrency is the bitcoin. In this paper we focus on this cryptocurrency and in particular on the modeling of the Bitcoin Blockchain by using the Petri Nets formalism. The proposed model allows us to quickly collect information about identities owning Bitcoin addresses and to recover measures and statistics on the Bitcoin network. By exploiting algebraic formalism, we reconstructed an Entities network associated to Blockchain transactions gathering together Bitcoin addresses into the single entity holding permits to manage Bitcoins held by those addresses. The model allows also to identify a set of behaviours typical of Bitcoin owners, like that of using an address only once, and to reconstruct chains for this behaviour together with the rate of firing. Our model is highly flexible and can easily be adapted to include different features of the Bitcoin crypto-currency system.

Simone Porru, Andrea Pinna, Michele Marchesi et al.

The Blockchain technology is reshaping finance, economy, money to the extent that its disruptive power is compared to that of the Internet and the Web in their early days. As a result, all the software development revolving around the Blockchain technology is growing at a staggering rate. In this paper, we acknowledge the need for software engineers to devise specialized tools and techniques for blockchain-oriented software development. From current challenges concerning the definition of new professional roles, demanding testing activities and novel tools for software architecture, we take a step forward by proposing new directions on the basis of a curate corpus of blockchain-oriented software repositories, detected by exploiting the information enclosed in the 2016 Moody's Blockchain Report and teh market capitalization of cryptocurrencies. Ensuring effective testing activities, enhancing collaboration in large teams, and facilitating the development of smart contracts all appear as key factors in the future of blockchain-oriented software development.