Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to selfarchive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

Nowadays in the software development environment SMEs occupies a considerable percentage of the number of companies. SME's generate the 52% of the gross domestic product of the countries and around 72% of the formal employees. For this reason, it is important to guarantee the quality of SME´s products improving the quality of processes used to develop them. However, SMEs suffer lack of implementation of formal processes for the software development. This paper shows the research results that aim to establish a characterization of SMEs, so the needs that SMEs face in the implementation of software process improvement are highlighted. To achieve this, a systematic review protocol was performed. The application of this protocol has allowed to identify the effort regarding to software process improvement and the main limitations faced by SMEs. Besides, the paper emphasizes the advantages and benefits that an organization gets with the implementation of software processes improvement.

No abstract