Evidence-Based Software Engineering
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
Evidence-Based Software Engineering for Practitioners
IEEE Software
On the success of empirical studies in the international conference on software engineering
Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
A Systematic Review of Software Development Cost Estimation Studies
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
A Systematic Review of Theory Use in Software Engineering Experiments
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Search Engine Overlaps: Do they agree or disagree?
REBSE '07 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Realising Evidence-Based Software Engineering
Systematic review: A systematic review of effect size in software engineering experiments
Information and Software Technology
Developing Search Strategies for Detecting Relevant Experiments for Systematic Reviews
ESEM '07 Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Applying Systematic Reviews to Diverse Study Types: An Experience Report
ESEM '07 Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Presenting software engineering results using structured abstracts: a randomised experiment
Empirical Software Engineering
Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A systematic literature review
Information and Software Technology
A systematic review of quasi-experiments in software engineering
Information and Software Technology
Developing search strategies for detecting relevant experiments
Empirical Software Engineering
ESEM '09 Proceedings of the 2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
ESEM '09 Proceedings of the 2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Software effort estimation terminology: The tower of Babel
Information and Software Technology
On scoping stakeholders and artifacts in software process
ICSP'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New modeling concepts for today's software processes: software process
Software process simulation modeling: an extended systematic review
ICSP'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New modeling concepts for today's software processes: software process
Reference-based search strategies in systematic reviews
EASE'09 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
On searching relevant studies in software engineering
EASE'10 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
Systematic literature studies: database searches vs. backward snowballing
Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
A systematic review of system-of-systems architecture research
Proceedings of the 9th international ACM Sigsoft conference on Quality of software architectures
A mixed-method approach for the empirical evaluation of the issue-based variability modeling
Journal of Systems and Software
Graphical user interface (GUI) testing: Systematic mapping and repository
Information and Software Technology
On evaluating commercial Cloud services: A systematic review
Journal of Systems and Software
Information and Software Technology
Information and Software Technology
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Context: Systematic literature review (SLR) has become an important research methodology in software engineering since the introduction of evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) in 2004. One critical step in applying this methodology is to design and execute appropriate and effective search strategy. This is a time-consuming and error-prone step, which needs to be carefully planned and implemented. There is an apparent need for a systematic approach to designing, executing, and evaluating a suitable search strategy for optimally retrieving the target literature from digital libraries. Objective: The main objective of the research reported in this paper is to improve the search step of undertaking SLRs in software engineering (SE) by devising and evaluating systematic and practical approaches to identifying relevant studies in SE. Method: We have systematically selected and analytically studied a large number of papers (SLRs) to understand the state-of-the-practice of search strategies in EBSE. Having identified the limitations of the current ad-hoc nature of search strategies used by SE researchers for SLRs, we have devised a systematic and evidence-based approach to developing and executing optimal search strategies in SLRs. The proposed approach incorporates the concept of 'quasi-gold standard' (QGS), which consists of collection of known studies, and corresponding 'quasi-sensitivity' into the search process for evaluating search performance. Results: We conducted two participant-observer case studies to demonstrate and evaluate the adoption of the proposed QGS-based systematic search approach in support of SLRs in SE research. Conclusion: We report their findings based on the case studies that the approach is able to improve the rigor of search process in an SLR, as well as it can serve as a supplement to the guidelines for SLRs in EBSE. We plan to further evaluate the proposed approach using a series of case studies on varying research topics in SE.