Blockchain Developer Experience: A Multivocal Literature Review

2025-01-20

AI Summary

A systematic understanding of Blockchain Developer Experience (BcDEx) remains absent, revealing a significant gap between academic research and industrial practice. Method: We conducted a multilingual literature review (MLR), gray literature analysis, and thematic coding across 62 bilingual sources—including blogs (41.8%) and corporate documentation (21.8%)—to synthesize empirical evidence. Contribution/Results: We propose the first five-dimensional BcDEx framework: complexity abstraction, adoption facilitation, productivity enhancement, developer education, and experience evaluation. Our analysis shows that industry toolchains prioritize efficiency, cross-chain interoperability, and usability, while academic research lags behind in addressing these practical concerns. This work delivers the inaugural systematic DEx roadmap for blockchain engineering, bridging dual gaps: theoretical conceptualization of BcDEx and its empirical mapping to real-world development practices.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Other Foundations of Data Mining & Knowledge Management
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning
• Search and Optimization: Other Foundations of Search & Optimization

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economic aspects of blockchain and cryptocurrencies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Bridging structured and unstructured data

Abstract

The rise of smart contracts has expanded blockchain's capabilities, enabling the development of innovative decentralized applications (dApps). However, this advancement brings its own challenges, including the management of distributed architectures and immutable data. Addressing these complexities requires a specialized approach to software engineering, with blockchain-oriented practices emerging to support development in this domain. Developer Experience (DEx) is central to this effort, focusing on the usability, productivity, and overall satisfaction of tools and frameworks from the engineers' perspective. Despite its importance, research on Blockchain Developer Experience (BcDEx) remains limited, with no systematic mapping of academic and industry efforts. To bridge this gap, we conducted a Multivocal Literature Review analyzing 62 to understand the distribution of BcDEx sources, practical implementations, and their impact. Our findings revealed that academic focus on BcDEx is limited compared to the coverage in gray literature, which primarily includes blogs (41.8%) and corporate sources (21.8%). Particularly, development efficiency, multi-network support, and usability are the most addressed aspects in tools and frameworks. In addition, we found that BcDEx is being shaped through five key perspectives: complexity abstraction, adoption facilitation, productivity enhancement, developer education, and BcDEx evaluation.

Problem

• Blockchain Developer Experience
• Systematic Research
• Integration of Academic and Industrial Efforts

Innovation

• Blockchain Developer Experience
• Systematic Review
• Optimization Strategies