ABSTRACT
Background: Maintenance and traceability (versioning) are constant concerns in Software Engineering (SE), however, few works related to these topics in Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) were found. Goal: The goal of this research is to elucidate how SLRs can be maintained and what are the benefits and drawbacks in this process. Method: This work presents a survey where experienced researchers that conducted SLRs between 2011 and 2015 answered questions about maintenance and traceability and, using software maintenance concepts, it addresses the SLRs maintenance process. From the 79 e-mails sent we reach 28 answers. Results: 19 of surveyed researchers have shown interest in keeping their SLRs up-to-date, but they have expressed concerns about the effort to be made to accomplish it. It was also observed that 20 participants would be willing to share their SLRs in common repositories, such as GitHub. Conclusions: There is a need to perform maintenance on SLRs. Thus, we are proposing a SLR maintenance process, taking into account some benefits and drawbacks identified during our study and presented through the paper.
- F. Q. B. da Silva, A. L. M. Santos, S. Soares, A. C. C. França, C. V. F. Monteiro, and F. F. Maciel. 2011. Six Years of Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering: An Updated Tertiary Study. Inf. Softw. Technol. 53, 9 (Sept. 2011), 899--913. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. R. Felizardo, E. Mendes, M. Kalinowski, E. F. Souza, and N. L. Vijaykumar. 2016. Using Forward Snowballing to Update Systematic Reviews in Software Engineering (ESEM '16). Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Higgins and S. Green(editors). 2011. Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions Version 5.1.0 {updated March 2011}. Available from www.cochrane-handbook.org.Google Scholar
- S. Jalali and C. Wohlin. 2012. Systematic literature studies: Database searches vs. backward snowballing (ESEM '12). Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Kitchenham, O. Pearl Brereton, and D. Budgen. 2008. Protocol for extending a tertiary study of systematic literature reviews in software engineering.Google Scholar
- B. Kitchenham, O. Pearl Brereton, D. Budgen, M. Turner, J. Bailey, and S. Linkman. 2009. Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A systematic literature review. Information and Software Technology 51, 1 (2009), 7 -- 15. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Kitchenham, O. Pearl Brereton, Z. Li, D. Budgen, and A. Burn. 2011. Repeatability of systematic literature reviews. In 15th Annual Conference on Evaluation Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2011). 46--55.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. Kitchenham and S. Charters. 2007. Guidelines for performing Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering.Google Scholar
- B. Kitchenham, R. Pretorius, D. Budgen, O. Pearl Brereton, M. Turner, M. Niazi, and S. Linkman. 2010. Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering - A Tertiary Study. Inf. Softw. Technol. 52, 8 (2010), 792--805. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. MacDonell, M. Shepperd, B. Kitchenham, and E. Mendes. 2010. How Reliable Are Systematic Reviews in Empirical Software Engineering? IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 36, 5 (2010), 676--687. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. M. Garcés Rodriguez, K. R. Felizardo, L. B. R. Oliveira, and E. Y. Nakagawa. 2017. An Experience Report on Update of Systematic Literature Reviews. In The 29th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering.Google Scholar
- Ian Sommerville. 2010. Software Engineering (9th ed.). Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, USA. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. Wohlin. 2016. Second-generation Systematic Literature Studies Using Snowballing (EASE '16). Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
Maintaining systematic literature reviews: benefits and drawbacks
Recommendations
Towards Sustainability of Systematic Literature Reviews
ESEM '21: Proceedings of the 15th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)Background: The software engineering community has increasingly conducted systematic literature reviews (SLR) as a means to summarize evidence from different studies and bring to light the state of the art of a given research topic. While SLR provide ...
Avoiding Plagiarism in Systematic Literature Reviews: An Update Concern
ESEM '20: Proceedings of the 14th ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM)Background: The number of Systematic Literature Reviews published in Software Engineering has been increasing in recent years. Due to this fact, one point not addressed is the possibility of plagiarism when dealing with SLRs, especially when dealing ...
Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering
EASE '14: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software EngineeringBackground: Systematic literature studies have become common in software engineering, and hence it is important to understand how to conduct them efficiently and reliably.
Objective: This paper presents guidelines for conducting literature reviews using ...
Comments