Second-generation systematic literature studies using snowballing
Claes Wohlin · 2016
Systematic literature studies have become standard practice in software engineering to synthesize evidence in different areas of the discipline. As more such studies are published, there is also a need to extend previously published systematic literature studies to cover new research papers. These first extensions become second-generation systematic literature studies. It has been asserted that snowballing would be a suitable search strategy for these types of second-generation studies, since newer studies ought to refer to previous research on a topic, and in particular to systematic literature studies published in an area. This paper compares using a snowballing search strategy with a published second-generation study using a database search strategy in the area of cross-company vs. within-company effort estimation. It is concluded that the approaches are comparable when it comes to which papers they find, although the snowballing approach is more efficient in this particular case.