Towards trustworthy tracing responsibility of collaborative software engineering artefacts of student's software projects

Current document version control systems (VCS) are prone to impersonation in changes to the artefacts and their update history, risking its credibility. This is particularly problematic in specific application domains such as in Education, where teachers have to have the means to prevent and detect students' unethical behaviour or fraud, as grading is one of the essential pillars of trust in the correction and fairness in the conduct of the educational system. Therefore, there is a need for a completely secure, trustworthy and easy-to-use version management of digital artefacts, which can be used to introduce students to the world of version control. We thus propose a blockchain-based solution for version control of engineering artefacts. The goal is to facilitate collaboration in a multi-user area, like the education field, and track changes in a trusted and secure manner. As a proof of concept, we designed and implemented a solution using the Hyperledger Fabric Network to govern and regulate file version control functions among students and teachers. Our prototype is hosted on the cloud and uses Git and GitHub to hash and store the different artefact versions and the blockchain network to keep all the changes in a perpetual and immutable way tracing to their respective authors non-prone to forgery. Besides constructing the proof of concept tool prototype, we conducted a usability experiment. The results of the usability tests were positive, with users with limited experience in version control systems starting to use and comprehend the solution in little time. The next step will be to generalize and evolve this tool to other application scenarios where trustworthy tracing is essential.