DOCSLIB.ORG

Interactive Execution of Non-Interactive Test Framework Features - in Collaboration with Ericsson AB

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Interactive Execution of Non-Interactive Test Framework Features - in Collaboration with Ericsson AB Bachelor Degree Project Interactive Execution of Non-interactive Test Framework Features - In Collaboration with Ericsson AB Author: Niklas Eriksson Supervisor: F rancis Palma Semester. VT 2020 Subject: Computer Science Abstract Some software libraries and frameworks get built to assist engineers in other domains than software engineering. However, these tools can be too complicated for these engineers to utilize due to their inexperience in software engineering. The engineers must then request assistance from more experienced software engineers. And when experienced software engineers must assist, they can spend less time on their original work. This problem got identified at Ericsson AB for one of their test automation frameworks for radio development, where test cases had to be written in pure Java code by test engineers without the test engineers always having the necessary skills to do so. In collaboration with Ericsson, we address this problem by applying design science to develop a novel technique that enables interactive execution of parts of this framework, called MJE Actions. We then present a prototype that embodies this novel technique. It enables test engineers at Ericsson to interactively execute MJE Actions via command-line without having to write a single line of Java code. Keywords: command-line interface, fluent interface, software design, software architecture, test automation framework, method chaining. Preface The basis for this research initially stemmed from my passion for software design and development. Due to my inexperience in developing command-line interfaces, I saw collaborating with Ericsson AB to design and develop one as an excellent opportunity to learn and gain more experience. In truth, I could not have achieved my current level of success without all the support from supervisors and family. First of all, I thank my parents, who have provided me with love and understanding. Secondly, I thank my university supervisor and my supervisor at Ericsson that has guided me through the process of succeeding with my research. Thank you all for your unswerving support. Contents 1 Introduction 5 1.1 Background 5 1.2 Problem formulation 6 1.3 Motivation 7 1.4 Related work 7 1.5 Objectives 8 1.6 Target group 9 1.7 Scope/Limitation 9 1.8 Outline 9 2 Method 10 2.1 Design Science 10 2.2 Instantiation of Design Science 11 2.3 Reliability and Validity 11 2.4 Ethical Considerations 11 3 Objectives for a solution 12 4 Implementation 13 4.1 Abstract Design 13 4.2 Concrete Design 15 4.3 Development 17 5 Results 23 6 Analysis 29 6.1 Fulfillment of requirements 29 6.2 Evaluation of the prototype 30 6.3 Concluding discussion 30 7 Conclusion & Future work 32 References 34 Appendix A - The requirements of the prototype 36 Appendix B - The test cases for the prototype 37 1 Introduction This report presents the execution of a bachelor's degree project at Linnaeus University of 15 credits. The project is a collaboration with the telecom company Ericsson AB targeting a problem about their test engineers having a hard time using a Java Test Framework practically and efficiently to fulfill their needs and goals. 1.1 Background Most software libraries and frameworks are designed and implemented for trained software engineers and software developers. Some software packages are built for domain experts in other domains than computer science or software engineering. These domain experts might not have enough programming skills to efficiently use various software tools [1], resulting in heavily requested assistance by more experienced software developers. In Development Services and Infrastructure (DSI), Ericsson develops Continuous Integration framework, test tools, test automation framework, test orchestration, and test environment. The mission for DSI is to enable cost-efficient radio development worldwide with their development environment as a competitive advantage, both for present and future business needs. In the test department of DSI, they develop the test automation framework, called MJE (MSRAN 1 JCAT [Java Common Automatic Test] Extension). It is developed in Java and uses, except for functionality developed in the organization, open-source software like TestNg [2], and Spring beans [3]. MJE provides functionality that provides nodes (e.g., base stations), user equipment (e.g., mobiles, simulators), logging features, and much of other common functionality to the test programs written in Java, i.e., test cases. In other words, an MJE test program is a Java program implemented on top of the MJE framework. For using MJE as described above, test engineers and developers need to write Java programs that implement the test cases. Finally, they can execute these programs in the test environment. In case of failure, the test engineers can study the logs to determine the root cause. MJE has three abstraction levels where the top-level, i.e., Action, could be 1 MSRAN is an organization name in Ericsson AB. used to write short test programs by using the built-in functionality provided by the framework. The test engineers would benefit considerably from improved test support that enables interactive execution of MJE actions via a command-line interface. 1.2 Problem formulation Having to request more experienced software developers for assistance when utilizing a given software library demands more time and other resources. This approach is not practical since the domain experts must spend much time on things that are not in their area of expertise, and the software developers assisting the domain experts must spend much time doing tasks that are very much routine for them. This degree project investigates how to enable interactive MJE Action execution via a command-line-interface(CLI). Currently, MJE Actions can only execute via invocations declared in the source code of an MJE-based test program. The command-line based solution makes it possible to execute MJE Actions as if they were commands, interactively, and with faster turnaround time; from writing a test case to the execution of the test case. As a proof of concept, we would like to find out if there is a way to enable interactive execution of MJE Actions via the command-line and develop a prototype as a proof of concept. The core problem addressed is How can we create a novel technique for a CLI that supports the interactive execution of MJE Actions? A new technique will assist test engineers to explore and find new ways to test the System Under Test [10] that was never thought of before. The prototype will have generated commands based on the existing MJE Actions, that the user can run. After the completion of this degree project, Ericsson will further investigate the prototype by letting test engineers try it, to find out if the test engineers would gain any value of the prototype and if further development should take place or not. 1.3 Motivation By nature, an MJE-based test program is non-interactive. The life cycle of writing a test case and executing it takes in the best case some hours, up to a few days. Also, for writing the test case, Java competence is needed, which is not the case for all test engineers. An interactive and command-line based abstraction on top of MJE is supposed to help the above obstacles. The interactivity of the system increases the possibility of doing Exploratory Testing [11] and finding the weak parts of the System Under Test. The test engineers who lack Java experience would also be able to use the system quickly to realize their test ideas. The time for performing spontaneous and quick testing gets shortened. Ericsson also has a similar system, MoShell, which operates on a single node (e.g., base station). The simplicity and popularity of an interactive and command-based test system are already proven. Ericsson is interested in evaluating the same idea (a command-based interactive system) with MJE, which, unlike MoShell, operates on multiple nodes, tools, and protocols. Ericsson, with its mobile networks, among other product offerings, has a significant impact on society. Therefore, we believe that the findings of this study will positively affect society by prototyping easier test writing for Ericsson mobile networks. 1.4 Related work There exists a considerable body of work regarding CLI based development. Wesley Bland et al. developed a command-line interface (CLI) to interact with the software tool called OSCAR (open-source cluster application resources) [4]. Users could only interact with OSCAR via a graphical user interface (GUI). The CLI is an alternative user interface to the GUI and is a close mirror of the GUI, providing the same functionality [4]. In our case, there is no user interface to the MJE framework already, as test programs are written manually in Java. Similar to OSCAR CLI, our CLI does not change any functionality of the underlying system. Accelerating Test Automation Platform (ATAP) was developed to make test automation accessible to non-programmers by Anurag Dwarakanath et al. It works by automatically converting English-like test scripts to machine-executable code using Selenium WebDriver [1]. Comparing the ATAP project with ours, we find the similarity in that both want to enable non-programmers to utilize an underlying test framework. Martin Fowler created a framework for thinking about domain-specific languages (DSLs) [5]. It divides DSLs into internal DSLs, external DSLs, and language workbenches. An external DSL is an entirely separate language having a full written parser. In contrast, an Internal DSL is an idiomatic way of using a general-purpose language. A language workbench is a tool that, other than parsing and code generation, provides a better editing experience for DSL users. In all these three cases, it is important to have an explicit semantic model so that they form a "thin skin" over an underlying library [5].
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Building Great Interfaces with OOABL
    Building great Interfaces with OOABL Mike Fechner Director Übersicht © 2018 Consultingwerk Ltd. All rights reserved. 2 Übersicht © 2018 Consultingwerk Ltd. All rights reserved. 3 Übersicht Consultingwerk Software Services Ltd. ▪ Independent IT consulting organization ▪ Focusing on OpenEdge and related technology ▪ Located in Cologne, Germany, subsidiaries in UK and Romania ▪ Customers in Europe, North America, Australia and South Africa ▪ Vendor of developer tools and consulting services ▪ Specialized in GUI for .NET, Angular, OO, Software Architecture, Application Integration ▪ Experts in OpenEdge Application Modernization © 2018 Consultingwerk Ltd. All rights reserved. 4 Übersicht Mike Fechner ▪ Director, Lead Modernization Architect and Product Manager of the SmartComponent Library and WinKit ▪ Specialized on object oriented design, software architecture, desktop user interfaces and web technologies ▪ 28 years of Progress experience (V5 … OE11) ▪ Active member of the OpenEdge community ▪ Frequent speaker at OpenEdge related conferences around the world © 2018 Consultingwerk Ltd. All rights reserved. 5 Übersicht Agenda ▪ Introduction ▪ Interface vs. Implementation ▪ Enums ▪ Value or Parameter Objects ▪ Fluent Interfaces ▪ Builders ▪ Strong Typed Dynamic Query Interfaces ▪ Factories ▪ Facades and Decorators © 2018 Consultingwerk Ltd. All rights reserved. 6 Übersicht Introduction ▪ Object oriented (ABL) programming is more than just a bunch of new syntax elements ▪ It’s easy to continue producing procedural spaghetti code in classes ▪
    [Show full text]
  • Functional Javascript
    www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Functional JavaScript Michael Fogus www.it-ebooks.info Functional JavaScript by Michael Fogus Copyright © 2013 Michael Fogus. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O’Reilly books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://my.safaribooksonline.com). For more information, contact our corporate/ institutional sales department: 800-998-9938 or [email protected]. Editor: Mary Treseler Indexer: Judith McConville Production Editor: Melanie Yarbrough Cover Designer: Karen Montgomery Copyeditor: Jasmine Kwityn Interior Designer: David Futato Proofreader: Jilly Gagnon Illustrator: Robert Romano May 2013: First Edition Revision History for the First Edition: 2013-05-24: First release See http://oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781449360726 for release details. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O’Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Functional JavaScript, the image of an eider duck, and related trade dress are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly Media, Inc., was aware of a trade‐ mark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
    [Show full text]
  • Automating Testing with Autofixture, Xunit.Net & Specflow
    Design Patterns Michael Heitland Oct 2015 Creational Patterns • Abstract Factory • Builder • Factory Method • Object Pool* • Prototype • Simple Factory* • Singleton (* this pattern got added later by others) Structural Patterns ● Adapter ● Bridge ● Composite ● Decorator ● Facade ● Flyweight ● Proxy Behavioural Patterns 1 ● Chain of Responsibility ● Command ● Interpreter ● Iterator ● Mediator ● Memento Behavioural Patterns 2 ● Null Object * ● Observer ● State ● Strategy ● Template Method ● Visitor Initial Acronym Concept Single responsibility principle: A class should have only a single responsibility (i.e. only one potential change in the S SRP software's specification should be able to affect the specification of the class) Open/closed principle: “Software entities … should be open O OCP for extension, but closed for modification.” Liskov substitution principle: “Objects in a program should be L LSP replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program.” See also design by contract. Interface segregation principle: “Many client-specific I ISP interfaces are better than one general-purpose interface.”[8] Dependency inversion principle: One should “Depend upon D DIP Abstractions. Do not depend upon concretions.”[8] Creational Patterns Simple Factory* Encapsulating object creation. Clients will use object interfaces. Abstract Factory Provide an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes. Inject the factory into the object. Dependency Inversion Principle Depend upon abstractions. Do not depend upon concrete classes. Our high-level components should not depend on our low-level components; rather, they should both depend on abstractions. Builder Separate the construction of a complex object from its implementation so that the two can vary independently. The same construction process can create different representations.
    [Show full text]
  • Designpatternsphp Documentation Release 1.0
    DesignPatternsPHP Documentation Release 1.0 Dominik Liebler and contributors Jul 18, 2021 Contents 1 Patterns 3 1.1 Creational................................................3 1.1.1 Abstract Factory........................................3 1.1.2 Builder.............................................8 1.1.3 Factory Method......................................... 13 1.1.4 Pool............................................... 18 1.1.5 Prototype............................................ 21 1.1.6 Simple Factory......................................... 24 1.1.7 Singleton............................................ 26 1.1.8 Static Factory.......................................... 28 1.2 Structural................................................. 30 1.2.1 Adapter / Wrapper....................................... 31 1.2.2 Bridge.............................................. 35 1.2.3 Composite............................................ 39 1.2.4 Data Mapper.......................................... 42 1.2.5 Decorator............................................ 46 1.2.6 Dependency Injection...................................... 50 1.2.7 Facade.............................................. 53 1.2.8 Fluent Interface......................................... 56 1.2.9 Flyweight............................................ 59 1.2.10 Proxy.............................................. 62 1.2.11 Registry............................................. 66 1.3 Behavioral................................................ 69 1.3.1 Chain Of Responsibilities...................................
    [Show full text]
  • Design Patterns for QA Automation Anton Semenchenko
    Design Patterns for QA Automation Anton Semenchenko CONFIDENTIAL 1 Agenda, part 1 (general) 1. Main challenges 2. Solution 3. Design Patterns – the simplest definition 4. Design Patterns language – the simplest definition 5. Encapsulation – the most important OOP principle CONFIDENTIAL 2 Agenda, part 2 (main patterns) 1. Page Element 2. Page Object 3. Action CONFIDENTIAL 3 Agenda, part 3 (less popular patterns) 1. Flow (Fluent Interface) – Ubiquitous language – Key word driven – Behavior Driven Development (BDD) 2. Domain Specific Language (DSL) – Flow 3. Navigator (for Web) CONFIDENTIAL 4 Agenda, part 4 (take away points) 1. “Rules” and principles 2. A huge set of useful links 3. A huge set of examples CONFIDENTIAL 5 2 main challenges in our every day work (interview experience) 1. Pure design 2. Over design CONFIDENTIAL 6 Solution 1. Find a balance CONFIDENTIAL 7 Design Patterns – the simplest definition 1. Elements (blocks) of reusable object-oriented software; 2. The re-usable form of a solution to a design problem; CONFIDENTIAL 8 Design Patterns – as a language 1. Design patterns that relate to a particular field (for example QA Automation) is called a pattern language 2. Design Patterns language gives a common terminology for discussing the situations specialists are faced with: – “The elements of this language are entities called patterns”; – “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our (QA Automation) environment”; – “Each pattern describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice!” CONFIDENTIAL 9 Design Patterns for QA Automation 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Drools Expert User Guide
    Drools Expert User Guide Version 6.0.0.CR2 by The JBoss Drools team [http://www.jboss.org/drools/team.html] ....................................................................................................................................... vii 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 1.1. Artificial Intelligence ............................................................................................ 1 1.1.1. A Little History ......................................................................................... 1 1.1.2. Knowledge Representation and Reasoning ................................................ 2 1.1.3. Rule Engines and Production Rule Systems (PRS) .................................... 3 1.1.4. Hybrid Reasoning Systems (HRS) ............................................................ 5 1.1.5. Expert Systems ........................................................................................ 8 1.1.6. Recommended Reading ........................................................................... 9 1.2. Why use a Rule Engine? .................................................................................. 12 1.2.1. Advantages of a Rule Engine ................................................................. 13 1.2.2. When should you use a Rule Engine? ..................................................... 14 1.2.3. When not to use a Rule Engine .............................................................. 15 1.2.4. Scripting
    [Show full text]
  • Efficient Engineering and Execution of Pipe-And-Filter Architectures
    Efficient Engineering and Execution of Pipe-and-Filter Architectures Dissertation M.Sc. Christian Wulf Dissertation zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Doktor der Ingenieurwissenschaften (Dr.-Ing.) der Technischen Fakultät der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel eingereicht im Jahr 2019 1. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Hasselbring Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Steffen Becker Universität Stuttgart Datum der mündlichen Prüfung: 19. Juli 2019 ii Zusammenfassung Pipe-and-Filter (P&F) ist ein wohlbekannter und häufig verwendeter Archi- tekturstil. Allerdings gibt es unseres Wissens nach kein P&F-Framework, das beliebige P&F-Architekturen sowohl modellieren als auch ausführen kann. Beispielsweise unterstützen die Frameworks FastFlow, StreamIT and Spark nicht mehrere Input- und Output-Ströme pro Filter, sodass sie kei- ne Verzweigungen modellieren können. Andere Frameworks beschränken sich auf sehr spezielle Anwendungsfälle oder lassen die Typsicherheit zwi- schen zwei miteinander verbundenen Filtern außer Acht. Außerdem ist eine effiziente parallele Ausführung von P&F-Architekturen weiterhin eine Herausforderung. Obwohl einige vorhandene Frameworks Filter parallel ausführen können, gibt es noch viel Optimierungspotential. Leider besit- zen die meisten Frameworks kaum Möglichkeiten, die einzig vorhandene Ausführungsstrategie ohne großen Aufwand anzupassen. In dieser Arbeit präsentieren wir unser generisches und paralleles P&F- Framework TeeTime. Es kann beliebige P&F-Architekturen sowohl model- lieren als auch ausführen. Gleichzeitig ist es offen für Modifikationen, um mit dem P&F-Stil zu experimentieren. Zudem erlaubt es, Filter effizient und parallel auf heutigen Multi-core-Systemen auszuführen. Umfangreiche Laborexperimente zeigen, dass TeeTime nur einen sehr geringen und in gewissen Fällen gar keinen zusätzlichen Laufzeit-Overhead im Vergleich zu Implementierungen ohne P&F-Abstraktionen erfordert.
    [Show full text]
  • Lessons in Software Evolution Learned by Listening to Smalltalk *
    Lessons in Software Evolution Learned by Listening to Smalltalk ? Oscar Nierstrasz and Tudor G^ırba Software Composition Group, University of Bern, Switzerland http://scg.unibe.ch Abstract. The biggest challenge facing software developers today is how to gracefully evolve complex software systems in the face of chang- ing requirements. We clearly need software systems to be more dynamic, compositional and model-centric, but instead we continue to build sys- tems that are static, baroque and inflexible. How can we better build change-enabled systems in the future? To answer this question, we pro- pose to look back to one of the most successful systems to support change, namely Smalltalk. We briefly introduce Smalltalk with a few simple ex- amples, and draw some lessons for software evolution. Smalltalk's sim- plicity, its reflective design, and its highly dynamic nature all go a long way towards enabling change in Smalltalk applications. We then illus- trate how these lessons work in practice by reviewing a number of re- search projects that support software evolution by exploiting Smalltalk's design. We conclude by summarizing open issues and challenges for change-enabled systems of the future. 1 Introduction The conventional view of disciplined software construction is to reason that cor- rectness of the final result is paramount, so we must invest carefully in rigorous requirements collection, specification, verification and validation. Of course these things are important, but the fallacy is to suppose that there is a final result. This leads one to the flawed corollary that it is possible to get the requirements right. The truth (as we know) is that in practice evolu- tion is paramount [26,32], so the system is never finished, and neither are its requirements [4].
    [Show full text]
  • Teaching Functional Programming to Professional .NET Developers
    Teaching Functional Programming to Professional .NET Developers Tomas Petricek 1 1 University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom [email protected] Abstract. Functional programming is often taught at universities to first-year or second-year students and most of the teaching materials have been written for this audience. With the recent rise of functional programming in the industry, it becomes important to teach functional concepts to professional developers with deep knowledge of other paradigms, most importantly object-oriented. We present our experience with teaching functional programming and F# to experienced .NET developers through a book Real-World Functional Program- ming and commercially offered F# trainings. The most important novelty in our approach is the use of C# for relating functional F# with object-oriented C# and for introducing some of the functional concepts. By presenting principles such as immutability, higher-order functions and functional types from a different perspective, we are able to build on existing knowledge of professional developers. This contrasts with a common approach that asks students to forget everything they know about programming and think completely differently. We believe that our observations are relevant for train- ings designed for practitioners, but perhaps also for students who explore fun- ctional relatively late in the curriculum. 1 Introduction Until recently, object-oriented languages such as Java, C# and C++ were dominating the industry. Despite this fact, functional languages have been successfully taught at universities and interesting approaches to teaching functional languages have been developed. Professionals approached functional programming with the intention to learn about different style of thinking, with the aim of becoming better developers by broadening their horizons.
    [Show full text]
  • Asp.Net Mvc 5 - Building a Website with Visual Studio 2015 and C Sharp: the Tactical Guidebook Pdf, Epub, Ebook
    ASP.NET MVC 5 - BUILDING A WEBSITE WITH VISUAL STUDIO 2015 AND C SHARP: THE TACTICAL GUIDEBOOK PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Jonas Fagerberg | 492 pages | 07 Jul 2016 | Createspace Independent Publishing Platform | 9781535167864 | English | United States ASP.Net MVC 5 - Building a Website with Visual Studio 2015 and C Sharp: The Tactical Guidebook PDF Book Creating a Windows service in. New other. This post contains the required steps to make it work. Proguard is an optimizer and obfuscator for Java code. An example of that is Vue. Doing this in my new technology stack took a bit more time. This is what we really want to say to you who love reading so considerably. There's also a lively ecosystem for extensions, which can improve the development experience even further. However, a very important detail about this approach is mentioned very briefly in the documentation. NET library. NET Core 1. In this follow-up post I describe how to configure TeamCity for Grunt and provide a couple of hints how to make it work even better. NET Framework 3. Mocking the fetch call would be the easiest way to do that. FluentValidation is a small portable validation library with fluent interface. Start by installing Visual Studio However, even with lazy loading enabled, application performance can be tweaked further with different configurations options. It worked great for running tests during development, but lacks support for headless test execution on a build server. They can be based on data in an external data source such as a hierarchy of folders or categories, for example.
    [Show full text]
  • Shallow Edsls and Object-Oriented Programming Beyond Simple Compositionality
    Shallow EDSLs and Object-Oriented Programming Beyond Simple Compositionality Weixin Zhanga and Bruno C. d. S. Oliveiraa a The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Abstract Context. Embedded Domain-Specific Languages (EDSLs) are a common and widely used approach to DSLs in various languages, including Haskell and Scala. There are two main implementation techniques for EDSLs: shallow embeddings and deep embeddings. Inquiry. Shallow embeddings are quite simple, but they have been criticized in the past for being quite limited in terms of modularity and reuse. In particular, it is often argued that supporting multiple DSL inter- pretations in shallow embeddings is difficult. Approach. This paper argues that shallow EDSLs and Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) are closely re- lated. Gibbons and Wu already discussed the relationship between shallow EDSLs and procedural abstraction, while Cook discussed the connection between procedural abstraction and OOP. We make the transitive step in this paper by connecting shallow EDSLs directly to OOP via procedural abstraction. The knowledge about this relationship enables us to improve on implementation techniques for EDSLs. Knowledge. This paper argues that common OOP mechanisms (including inheritance, subtyping, and type- refinement) increase the modularity and reuse of shallow EDSLs when compared to classical procedural ab- straction by enabling a simple way to express multiple, possibly dependent, interpretations. Grounding. We make our arguments by using Gibbons and Wu’s examples, where procedural abstraction is used in Haskell to model a simple shallow EDSL. We recode that EDSL in Scala and with an improved OO-inspired Haskell encoding. We further illustrate our approach with a case study on refactoring a deep external SQL query processor to make it more modular, shallow, and embedded.
    [Show full text]
  • Blocksci: Design and Applications of a Blockchain Analysis Platform
    BlockSci: Design and applications of a blockchain analysis platform Harry Kalodner, Malte Möser, and Kevin Lee, Princeton University; Steven Goldfeder, Cornell Tech; Martin Plattner, University of Innsbruck; Alishah Chator, Johns Hopkins University; Arvind Narayanan, Princeton University https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentation/kalodner This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium. August 12–14, 2020 978-1-939133-17-5 Open access to the Proceedings of the 29th USENIX Security Symposium is sponsored by USENIX. BlockSci: Design and applications of a blockchain analysis platform Harry Kalodner∗ Malte Möser∗ Kevin Lee Steven Goldfeder Princeton University Princeton University Princeton University Cornell Tech Martin Plattner Alishah Chator Arvind Narayanan University of Innsbruck Johns Hopkins University Princeton University Abstract for cryptocurrency traders. Instead, by providing efficient and convenient programmatic access to the full blockchain data, Analysis of blockchain data is useful for both scientific re- it enables a wide range of reproducible, scientific analyses. search and commercial applications. We present BlockSci, an open-source software platform for blockchain analysis. BlockSci’s design starts with the observation that BlockSci is versatile in its support for different blockchains blockchains are append-only databases; further, the snapshots and analysis tasks. It incorporates an in-memory, analytical used for research are static. Thus, the ACID properties of (rather than transactional) database, making it orders of mag- transactional databases are unnecessary. This makes an in- nitudes faster than using general-purpose graph databases. We memory analytical database the natural choice. On top of describe BlockSci’s design and present four analyses that il- the obvious speed gains of memory, we apply a number of lustrate its capabilities, shedding light on the security, privacy, tricks such as converting hash pointers to actual pointers and and economics of cryptocurrencies.
    [Show full text]