Asia Pacific University Library catalogue

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of MSc. in Software Engineering (UCMF1808SE).

The purpose of this qualitative research is to investigate the vulnerability and security challenges faced by the smart contract basedblockchain applications especially immutable bugs, reliability and exploitations of miscellaneous programing bugs and design an appropriate testing guidelines for testing smart contract based blockchain applications. Hence testing guidelines for smart contract based blockchain application has being proposed in this research to address the vulnerability issues and security concerns such as reentrancy, race conditions and decentralized autonomous attacks (DAO). The proposed guidelines are designed based on previous researches and by conducting structure interviews. Thus the data collected are analyzed using Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDA) software known as Nvivo where codes, sub-categories, categories and themes are generated. It is discovered that there are three main key elements that influence the testing of smart contract based blockchain applications known as nature or use case of smart contract, blockchain architecture and available resources which are considered as three pillars of testing in smart contract based blockchain applications. Therefore the level of testing, test priorities and fault tolerance in the testing phases and steps of testing smart contract based blockchain applications are depends on these three pillars. In addition, effectiveness of the proposed guidelines and limitations are highlighted. Furthermore to evaluate and validate the proposed guidelines expert reviews are conducted in this research and the results shows that the design testing guidelines for smart contract based blockchain can be implemented to reduce or overcome the vulnerability and security issues.