On the pragmatic design of literature studies in software engineering: an experience-based guideline

Kuhrmann, Marco; Méndez, Daniel; Daneva, Maya

doi:10.1007/s10664-016-9492-y

Cited by 131 publications

(137 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…The first phase of finding IaC-related publications is to search the scholar databases. For our paper, we select six scholar databases following Kuhrmann We select these six scholar databases as these databases are recommended for conducting systematic mapping studies and literature reviews [30].…”

Section: Phase One: Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systematic mapping study of infrastructure as code research

Rahman¹,

Mahdavi-Hezaveh²,

Williams³

2019

Information and Software Technology

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Context: Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice to automatically configure system dependencies and to provision local and remote instances. Practitioners consider IaC as a fundamental pillar to implement DevOps practices, which helps them to rapidly deliver software and services to end-users. Information technology (IT) organizations, such as Github, Mozilla, Facebook, Google and Netflix have adopted IaC. A systematic mapping study on existing IaC research can help researchers to identify potential research areas related to IaC, for example, the areas of defects and security flaws that may occur in IaC scripts.Objective: The objective of this paper is to help researchers identify research areas related to infrastructure as code (IaC) by conducting a systematic mapping study of IaC-related research.Methodology: We conduct our research study by searching six scholar databases.We collect a set of 33,887 publications by using seven search strings. By systematically applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, we identify 31 publications related to IaC. We identify topics addressed in these publications by applying qualitative analysis. Results:We identify four topics studied in IaC-related publications: (i) framework/tool for infrastructure as code; (ii) use of infrastructure as code; (iii) em-pirical study related to infrastructure as code; and (iv) testing in infrastructure as code. According to our analysis, 52% of the studied 31 publications propose a framework or tool to implement the practice of IaC or extend the functionality of an existing IaC tool.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that framework or tools is a well-studied topic in IaC research. As defects and security flaws can have serious consequences for the deployment and development environments in DevOps, along with other topics, we observe the need for research studies that will study defects and security flaws for IaC.

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Section: Phase One: Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

A systematic mapping study of infrastructure as code research

Rahman¹,

Mahdavi-Hezaveh²,

Williams³

2019

Information and Software Technology

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“…• Round 3: Following existing guidelines [52], [50], we perform a snowball search using the reference list of our studies and citations obtained from the previous Round 2 to identify new studies and decide whether to include additional paper(s) or article(s); such technique helps us not to miss important and relevant papers related to the field. Those remaining papers are read carefully afterwards.…”

Section: B Search and Selection Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Fragmentation a Threat to the Success of the Internet of Things?

Aly

Khomh

Guéhéneuc

et al. 2019

IEEE Internet Things J.

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Internet of Things (IoT) aims to bring connectivity to almost every objects, i.e., things, found in the physical space. It extends connectivity to everyday things, however, such increase in the connectivity creates many prominent challenges.Context: Generally, IoT opens the door for new applications for machine-to-machine (M2M) and human-to-human communications. The current trend of collaborating, distributed teams through the Internet, mobile communications, and autonomous entities, e.g., robots, is the first phase of the IoT to develop and deliver diverse services and applications. However, such collaborations is threatened by the fragmentation that we witness in the industry nowadays as it brings difficulty to integrate the diverse technologies of the various objects found in IoT systems. Diverse technologies induce interoperability issues while designing and developing various services and applications, hence, limiting the possibility of reusing the data, more specifically, the software (including frameworks, firmware, APIs, user interfaces) as well as of facing issues, like security threats and bugs, when developing new services or applications. Different aspects of handling data collection ranging from discovering smart sensors for data collection, integrating and applying reasoning on them must be available to provide interoperability and flexibility to the diverse objects interacting in the system. However, such approaches are bound to be challenged in future IoT scenarios as they bring substantial performance impairments in settings with the very large number of collaborating devices and technologies.Objective: We raise the awareness of the community about the lack of interoperability among technologies developed for IoT and challenges that their integration poses. We also provide guidelines for researchers and practitioners interested in connecting IoT networks and devices to develop services and applications.Method: We apply the methods advocated by the Evidencebased Software Engineering paradigm (EBSE). This paradigm and its core tool, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR), were introduced to the sofware-engineering research community early 2004 to help researchers and industry systematically and objectively gather and aggregate evidences about different topics. In this paper, we conduct a SLR of both IoT interoperability issues and the state-of-practice of IoT technologies in the industry, highlighting the integration challenges related to the IoT that have significantly shifted the landscape of Internet-based collaborative services and applications nowadays.Results: Our SLR identifies a number of studies from journals, conferences, and workshops with the highest quality in the Manuscript field. This SLR reports different trends, including frameworks and technologies, for the IoT for better comprehension of the paradigm and discusses the integration and interoperability challenges across the different layers of this technology while shedding light on the current IoT state-of-practice. It also discus...

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“…The task took about 20 minutes and produced three revised spreadsheets. The feedback from the experts was integrated in the final ontology 25 . In case of disagreement we went with the majority vote.…”

Section: Edam Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing the effort for systematic reviews in software engineering

Osborne

Muccini

Lago

et al. 2019

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Context. Systematic Reviews (SRs) are means for collecting and synthesizing evidence from the identification and analysis of relevant studies from multiple sources. To this aim, they use a well-defined methodology meant to mitigate the risks of biases and ensure repeatability for later updates. SRs, however, involve significant effort. Goal. The goal of this paper is to introduce a novel methodology that reduces the amount of manual tedious tasks involved in SRs while taking advantage of the value provided by human expertise. Method. Starting from current methodologies for SRs, we replaced the steps of keywording and data extraction with an automatic methodology for generating a domain ontology and classifying the primary studies. This methodology has been applied in the Software Engineering sub-area of Software Architecture and evaluated by human annotators. Results. The result is a novel Expert-Driven Automatic Methodology, EDAM, for assisting researchers in performing SRs. EDAM combines ontology-learning techniques and semantic technologies with the human-in-the-loop. The first (thanks to automation) fosters scalability, objectivity, reproducibility and granularity of the studies; the second allows tailoring to the specific focus of the study at hand and knowledge reuse from domain experts. We evaluated EDAM on the field of Software Architecture against six senior researchers. As a result, we found that the performance of the senior researchers in classifying papers was not statistically significantly different from EDAM. Conclusions. Thanks to automation of the less-creative steps in SRs, our methodology allows researchers to skip the tedious tasks of keywording and manually classifying primary studies, thus freeing effort for the analysis and the discussion.

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On the pragmatic design of literature studies in software engineering: an experience-based guideline

Cited by 131 publications

References 56 publications

A systematic mapping study of infrastructure as code research

A systematic mapping study of infrastructure as code research

Is Fragmentation a Threat to the Success of the Internet of Things?

Reducing the effort for systematic reviews in software engineering

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