Process for Systematic Literature Review and Systematic Mapping

Abstract

Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a research strategy intended to obtain evidence from scientific articles stored in digital repositories. It must be systematic, repeatable and auditable to formulate research questions about a thematic area or phenomenon of interest and to search, select, analyze and communicate all basic or applied research relevant findings in order to answer those questions. SLR, as well as Systematic Mapping (SM), can be carried out on primary or secondary studies. In both cases, well-established processes and methods are required. Although there are guides to the SLR process in Software Engineering, which indicate the steps to be followed in the three phases of the process proposed by Kitchenham, we believe that it would be a contribution for the research community to improve the current process specifications. To this end, we document the SLR process specification using mainly the SPEM (Software & Systems Process Engineering Metamodel) language and process modeling perspectives. As long as we develop the present work, we exemplify process aspects using a pilot SLR on software testing ontologies already performed. It should be noted that the proposed SLR process can also be used for SMs.