Deriving and Formalizing Requirements of Decentralized Applications for Inter-Organizational Collaborations on Blockchain

Traditional information systems that enable organizations to collaborate, share information and resources, have several weaknesses such as security, interoperability and transparency issues. As a result, organizations are now moving their inter-organizational collaborations to blockchains. The latter are decentralized networks that allows participants to store and replicate information across multiple nodes, thereby providing immutable and trustable access to data without relying on a central authority. The state of the art shows several blockchain technologies such as smart contracts, consensus methods and decentralized storage to enable enterprises in executing their collaborations on blockchains. However, absent is a suitable software-engineering-driven framework for designing blockchain decentralized applications that enable inter-organizational collaborations. This paper fills the gap by proposing a framework for developing decentralized applications for organizational collaborations by first showing a model-driven method for deriving requirements of blockchain applications. Therefore, this paper presents a goal-modelling method to systematically describe the requirements of a running case about inter-organizational collaboration. A goal-model diagram produced from the running case is formally evaluated for correctness and consistency using the model syntax-verification method described in this paper.