Smart Contract Developer Experience Enhancement

In the fast-growing world of Web3.0, one of the most innovative and crucial assets is the technology of smart contracts: an immutable and self-executing software that automatizes procedures to be executed during a transaction. They provide secure and trustworthy way to operate on the content of a transaction, but also require a high level of proficiency with coding and knowledge about security protocols. During this thesis, there has been an iterative exploration to study what are the most important characteristics worth to be implemented in the final solution, considering the user interface, the modeling of the operative methodology and the functionalities provided to the developers that have been designed for those iterations. After the completion of this phase, a toolkit embedded into a Visual Studio Code Extension has been developed, integrating the operative methodology and the most interesting features coming from the past iterations in three tools: the first one supporting to the developer with the application of the guidelines for the definition of the methodology; the second one offering a set of design patterns and best practices to adopt while coding; the third one is a prototype that generates a prompt of text for an AI to generate the code based on the formal specifications collected by means of the first tool. Finally, a test experience has shown a significant positive impact on the developer experience for the smart contract developers adopting the tool, even if they were completely inexperienced in smart contract coding: both the personal perception and the objective data related to the test have been collected an analyzed, showing a consistent improvement under all the aspects analyzed. Our studies suggest that the adoption of a Low-Code approach equipped with proper instruments can accelerate the ramp-up phase for inexpert smart contract developers and enforce the one of the most experienced developers.