Guidelines for the Search Strategy to Update Systematic Literature Reviews in Software Engineering

Context: Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) have been adopted within Software Engineering (SE) for more than a decade to provide meaningful summaries of evidence on several topics. Many of these SLRs are now potentially not fully up-to-date, and there are no standard proposals on how to update SLRs in SE. Objective: The objective of this paper is to propose guidelines on how to best search for evidence when updating SLRs in SE, and to evaluate these guidelines using an SLR that was not employed during the formulation of the guidelines. Method: To propose our guidelines, we compare and discuss outcomes from applying different search strategies to identify primary studies in a published SLR, an SLR update, and two replications in the area of effort estimation. These guidelines are then evaluated using an SLR in the area of software ecosystems, its update and a replication. Results: The use of a single iteration forward snowballing with Google Scholar, and employing as a seed set the original SLR and its primary studies is the most cost-effective way to search for new evidence when updating SLRs. Furthermore, the importance of having more than one researcher involved in the selection of papers when applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria is highlighted through the results. Conclusions: Our proposed guidelines formulated based upon an effort estimation SLR, its update and two replications, were supported when using an SLR in the area of software ecosystems, its update and a replication. Therefore, we put forward that our guidelines ought to be adopted for updating SLRs in SE.Comment: Author version of manuscript accepted for publication at the Information and Software Technology Journa

A perspectiva das mulheres na Engenharia de software na visão de alunas da área

Anais do 35º Seminário de Extensão Universitária da Região Sul - Área temática: Tecnologia e ProduçãoA representatividade da mulher no mercado de trabalho ainda é considerada baixa quando comparada a dos homens, principalmente quando são comparadas áreas relacionadas à Tecnologia da Informação (TI). Em universidades esse número não é diferente quando considerados os cursos na área de TI. Diante desse contexto, o objetivo desse trabalho é conduzir um questionário aplicado para alunas de graduação em Engenharia de Software em universidades brasileiras, buscando identificar o cenário atual das mulheres no campo da Engenharia de Software no Brasil e explorar suas dificuldades e influências na área. Como resultado, observou-se que as mulheres que se interessam pela Engenharia de Software são motivadas pela possibilidade de obter estabilidade financeira com essa formação ascendente no mercado de trabalho. No entanto, tais alunas se sentem subestimadas no ambiente da universidade por colegas e professores, além de reconhecerem que o ambiente de trabalho na área para mulheres ainda não é favoráve

Discalculia e Tecnologias Digitais Educacionais: uma Revisão Sistemática de Literatura

As tecnologias digitais são ferramentas que podem auxiliar em diversos contextos de ensino, principalmente para a educação especial, e no caso desta pesquisa, a discalculia. Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar os resultados de um estudo realizado para coletar e avaliar evidências sobre ferramentas computacionais gratuitas que auxiliem alunos com discalculia. Para atingir nosso objetivo, realizamos uma revisão sistemática da literatura, que fornece um método objetivo para identificar as evidências existentes relacionadas a um tema de pesquisa. Os resultados indicam que, dos 811 trabalhos encontrados nas 10 bases de buscas, somente 3 abordaram o uso das tecnologias digitais com crianças com discalculia na educação básica no contexto brasileiro. Nesses 3 trabalhos, foram mapeadas 21 ferramentas computacionais. Observou-se que, em relação a produção do conhecimento sobre as tecnologias digitais e a discalculia para o contexto escolar brasileiro, são poucas as pesquisas realizadas, o que pode dificultar a sua utilização nesse contexto

Establishing a Search String to Detect Secondary Studies in Software Engineering

Search for secondary studies is essential to establish whether the review on the intended topic has already been done, avoiding waste time. In addition, secondary studies are the inputs of a tertiary study. However, one critical step in searching for secondary studies is to elaborate a search string. The main goal of this work is to analyze search strings to establish directions to better detect secondary studies in Software Engineering (SE). We analyzed seven tertiary studies under two perspectives: (1) structure - strings' terms to detect secondary studies; and (2) field: where searching - titles alone or abstracts alone or titles and abstracts together, among others. We also performed a validation of the results found. The suitable search string for finding secondary studies in SE contain the terms "systematic review", "literature review", "systematic mapping", "mapping study", "systematic map", "meta-analysis", "survey" and "literature analysis". Furthermore, we recommend (1) researchers use the title, abstract and keywords search fields in their searches to increase studies recall; (2) researchers choose carefully their paper title, abstract and keyword terms to increase the chance of having such studies found on digital libraries

Towards a Process to Design Architectures of Service-Oriented Robotic Systems

International audienceArchitecture description languages (ADLs) should consider both structural and runtime perspectives of software architectures, an important requirement for current software systems. However, most existing ADLs are disconnected from the runtime level, thus entailing architectural mismatches and inconsistencies between architecture and implementation. With the emergence of the new generation programming languages for large-scale, dynamic, and distributed systems, this problem becomes worse since most existing ADLs do not capture the features of this type of language. In this context, we investigate the generation of source code in the Go programming language from architecture descriptions in the π-ADL language as they are both based on the π-calculus process algebra. We define the correspondences between π-ADL and Go elements and present how architecture descriptions in π-ADL can be automatically translated to their respective implementations in Go through a real-world flood monitoring system

Visual text mining: ensuring the presence of relevant studies in systematic literature reviews

One of the activities associated with the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process is the\ud selection review of primary studies. When the researcher faces large volumes of primary studies\ud to be analyzed, the process used to select studies can be arduous. In a previous experiment, we\ud conducted a pilot test to compare the performance and accuracy of PhD students in conducting\ud the selection review activity manually and using Visual Text Mining (VTM) techniques. The\ud goal of this paper is to describe a replication study involving PhD and Master students. The\ud replication study uses the same experimental design and materials of the original experiment.\ud This study also aims to investigate whether the researcher's level of experience with conducting\ud SLRs and research in general impacts the outcome of the primary study selection step of the\ud SLR process. The replication results have con¯rmed the outcomes of the original experiment,\ud i.e., VTM is promising and can improve the performance of the selection review of primary\ud studies. We also observed that both accuracy and performance increase in function of the\ud researcher's experience level in conducting SLRs. The use of VTM can indeed be bene¯cial\ud during the selection review activity.FAPES