Tools to support systematic reviews in software engineering

Abstract

BackgroundThe labour intensive and error prone nature of the systematic review process has led to the development and use of a range of tools to provide automated support.Aim The aim of this research is to evaluate a set of candidate tools that provide support for the overall systematic review process.Method A feature analysis is performed to compare and evaluate four candidate tools. ResultsEach of the candidates has some strengths and some weaknesses. SLuRp has the highest overall score and SLRTOOL has the lowest overall score. SLuRp scores well on process management features such as support for multiple users and document management and less well on ease of installation.Conclusions Although the tools do not yet support the whole systematic review process they provide a good basis for further development. We suggest a community effort to establish a set of features that can inform future tool development.

Designing service-based applications in the presence of non-functional properties: A mapping study

“…In [118], some of these tools are addressed. Two of these tools are StArt (State of the Art through Systematic Review) [55] and SLR-Tool [59].…”

Using the SCAS strategy to perform the initial selection of studies in systematic reviews

“…However, the tools have not been properly evaluated and the identified primary studies presented only some case studies or small experiments to exemplify the use of a tool or its effectiveness. Four tools (StArtState of the Art through Systematic Review [5], SLuRp, SLRTool, and SLRTool) support the whole SR process and they are evaluated in [9]. The authors used feature analysis to check the SR activities that each tool supports.…”

Classifying metrics for assessing Object-Oriented Software Maintainability: A family of metrics’ catalogs

“…A more recent work that presented a tool to support empirical studies was the Marshall and Brereton work [54]. They showed a research of some tools to support systematic mapping studies, and they concluded that there are a variety of tools are available to support the SLR process although many are in the early stages of development and usage.…”