Exploring Non-Functional Requirements for Blockchain-Oriented Systems

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology that is characterized by the five characteristics: Consensus, Decentralization, Immutability, Finality, and Provenance. Blockchain characteristics have been rapidly recognized as a turning point in many use case scenarios beyond the financial sector. Conversely, there is still a significant incongruity regarding how the blockchain’s unique characteristics can be mapped to the elicited non-functional requirements (NFRs) of blockchain-based systems. Motivated by exploring the potential categories of NFRs that dominate the landscape of blockchain-based systems, we conducted an inductive content analysis on a sample of extracted requirements from 7 different blockchain-based projects developed by two startup firms. This paper presents the initial view of the constructed mapping between the blockchain characteristics on one side and the dominating NFRs for the blockchain-based system.