The rapid evolution of blockchain technology has created a diverse ecosystem of platforms, tools, and applications, and understanding how these technologies are adopted and used in practice is essential for advancing Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering. This paper presents Web3BlockSet, a curated dataset that enables empirical insights into the blockchain ecosystem through the analysis of Mining Software Repositories on GitHub. We collected 391,596 Issues and Pull Requests from organizations that maintain core blockchain technologies and from community developers who create applications. The dataset offers broad categorization across the blockchain stack, a dual perspective of technology vendors and adopters, and rich metadata that supports diverse analytical approaches.

Blockchain has been relevant in the document management process, serving as a storage solution with the potential to guarantee the relevant requirements needed for any document storage and validation solution. However, due to the distributed nature of blockchain, we may face implementation difficulties and high operational costs, for example. To facilitate this process, we propose a customizable blockchain-based document registration service that makes it possible to create different types of gen-eralized documents for various application domains and store them in one or more blockchains integrated in an Application Programming Interface (API).

Search Based Software Engineering (SBSE) seeks to reformulate Software Engineering complex problems as search problems to be, hereafter, optimized through the usage of artificial intelligence techniques. As pointed out by Harman in 2007, in his seminal paper about the current state and future of SBSE, it would be very attractive to have convincing examples of human competitive results in order to champion the field. A landmark effort in this direction was made by Souza and others, in the paper titled “The Human Competitiveness of Search Based Software Engineering”, published at SSBSE’2010, voted by the SBSE community as the most influential paper of the past editions in the 10th anniversary of the SSBSE, in 2018. This paper presents a preliminary systematic mapping study to provide an overview of the current state of human competitiveness of SBSE, carried out via a snowball reading of Souza’s paper. The analyses of the 29 selected papers showed a growing interest in this topic, especially since 2010. Seven of those papers presented relevant experimental results, thus demonstrating the human competitiveness of results produced by SBSE approaches.

Search Based Software Engineering approaches have proven to be feasible and promising in tackling a number of software engineering problems. More recently, researchers have been considering the challenges and opportunities related to involving users’ expertise in the resolution process, among other reasons, to deal with the mistrust or misunderstanding of fully automated optimisation approaches. This paper presents a preliminary study concerned at assessing the users’ subjective perception when his/her preferences are considered in an Interactive SBSE approach. Regarding the evaluation, we conducted a placebo-controlled study with 12 software engineering practitioners by simulating a Next Release Problem scenario. The results indicate that most (68%) of the gain achieved by the interactive approach could be attributed to being the placebo effect, that is, refers strictly to the fact that the user felt part of the optimisation process. In addition, there was an important increased confidence in the results, even in the placebo group.