Distributed Ledgers in Developing Large-Scale Integrated Systems

Abstract

Large-scale development and maintenance projects involve numerous dependencies across multiple disparate organizations, and these projects are subject to contractual stipulations, customer requirements, stakeholder expectations, and compliance/regulatory issues. Because these dependencies and constraints can change over time, mechanisms must exist to absorb, propagate, and implement perturbations to the original scope of work. Such mechanisms are generally human-oriented, involving significant effort to confirm successful modification while avoiding systemic regression. Distributed Ledger Technology alleviates concerns of regression while providing costeffective, actionable business insight during the development of large-scale, integrated systems. Fine-grained insights benefit all parties involved in the system’s development, allowing for the incorporation of necessary systemic changes in an economical and informed manner. The system described in this work provides users of varying business roles with a single, clear, and concise view of their collaborative, large-scale development projects. This approach provides needed flexibility and functionality, allowing its users to maintain rigorous traceability while minimizing the time and attention needed to maintain valid project records. Further, practitioners are more well-informed regarding change impact and need not rely solely on subject-matter experts’ insights and judgments; instead, they rely on artifact provenance to reliably view the past and present of the project and reliably predict future impacts. Combining distributed ledgers and distributed storage creates a scalable, flexible platform for enterprise-grade project management.