TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding the Issue Types in Open Source Blockchain-Based Software Projects with the Transformer-Based BERTopic
AU - Opu, Md Nahidul Islam
AU - Islam, Shahidul
AU - Rouhani, Sara
AU - Chowdhury, Shaiful
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 IEEE.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - Blockchain-based software systems are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, yet a systematic understanding of their development challenges remains limited. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of 497,742 issues mined from 1,209 open-source blockchain projects hosted on GitHub. Employing BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique, we identify 49 distinct issue topics and organize them hierarchically into 11 major subcategories. Our analysis reveals that both general software development issues and blockchainspecific concerns are nearly equally represented, with Wallet Management and UI Enhancement emerging as the most prominent topics. We further examine the temporal evolution of issue categories and resolution times, finding that Wallet issues not only dominate in frequency but also exhibit the longest resolution time. Conversely, Mechanisms issues are resolved significantly faster. Issue frequency surged after 2016 with the rise of Ethereum and decentralized applications, but started declining after 2022. These findings enhance our understanding of blockchain software maintenance, informing the development of specialized tools and practices to improve robustness and maintainability.
AB - Blockchain-based software systems are increasingly deployed across diverse domains, yet a systematic understanding of their development challenges remains limited. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study of 497,742 issues mined from 1,209 open-source blockchain projects hosted on GitHub. Employing BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling technique, we identify 49 distinct issue topics and organize them hierarchically into 11 major subcategories. Our analysis reveals that both general software development issues and blockchainspecific concerns are nearly equally represented, with Wallet Management and UI Enhancement emerging as the most prominent topics. We further examine the temporal evolution of issue categories and resolution times, finding that Wallet issues not only dominate in frequency but also exhibit the longest resolution time. Conversely, Mechanisms issues are resolved significantly faster. Issue frequency surged after 2016 with the rise of Ethereum and decentralized applications, but started declining after 2022. These findings enhance our understanding of blockchain software maintenance, informing the development of specialized tools and practices to improve robustness and maintainability.
KW - BERTopic
KW - Blockchain
KW - GitHub Issues
KW - Resolution Time
KW - Topic Modeling
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105033226462
U2 - 10.1109/CASCON66301.2025.00075
DO - 10.1109/CASCON66301.2025.00075
M3 - Contribution to conference proceedings
AN - SCOPUS:105033226462
T3 - Proceedings - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and Computing, CASCON 2025
SP - 454
EP - 463
BT - Proceedings - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and Computing, CASCON 2025
A2 - Muller, Hausi A.
A2 - Zou, Ying
A2 - Bradbury, Jeremy
A2 - Stroulia, Eleni
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 35th IEEE International Conference on Collaborative Advances in Software and Computing, CASCON 2025
Y2 - 10 November 2025 through 13 November 2025
ER -