Output details

Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A systematic literature review

<33>This paper reported the first tertiary systematic literature review in the software engineering domain. The research catalogued existing systematic reviews and identified their quality and scope. The paper raised the profile of evidence-based software engineering and systematic literature reviews. This study was the first to utilise tertiary studies both to aggregate results from related secondary studies and to critique the quality of and methodology used in secondary studies. Since this paper was published at least 12 tertiary studies relating to software engineering have been performed, two of which updated this study.

This study used a methodology (a mapping study of systematic reviews) that was new to software engineering (SE) research. It provided new insights in two ways. Lessons were learned about the use of the systematic review (SR) methodology for software engineering research. These include demonstrating its potential value for synthesising evidence and making it available to researchers and practitioners, showing that SR quality has increased over time, highlighting the potential limitations of manual searching of research outlets, and stressing the value of mapping studies (of which this paper is an example) to the SE research community. The outcomes of the study also provide new insights. These include the identification of gaps in the topics covered, highlighting good research practice and indicating clusters of expertise.