Systematic reviews in mobile app software engineering: A tertiary study
Samer Zein, Norsaremah Salleh, John Grundy · Information and Software Technology · 2023
Context: A number of secondary studies in the form of systematic reviews and systematic mapping studies exist in the area of mobile application software engineering. Objective: The focus of this paper is to provide an overview and analysis of these secondary studies of mobile app software engineering for researchers and practitioners. Method: We conducted a systematic tertiary study following the guidelines by Kitchenham et al. to classify and analyze secondary studies in this area. Results: After going through several filtration steps, we identified 24 secondary studies addressing major software engineering phases, such as initiation, requirements engineering , design, development and testing. The majority of the secondary studies focused on testing and design phases. Specific research topics addressed by the included studies were: usability evaluation , test automation, context-aware testing, cloud-based development, architectural models , effort and size estimation models, defect prediction , and GUI testing. We found that the trend in secondary studies is towards more specific areas of mobile application software engineering such as architectural design models, context-aware testing, testing of non-functional requirements, mobile cloud computing , and intelligent mobile applications. Research directions and some identified practices for practitioners were also identified. Conclusions: Mobile application software engineering is an active research area. The area can benefit from additional research in terms of secondary studies targeting evolution, maintenance, requirements engineering, and cross-platform mobile application development. Additionally, some of the secondary studies identify some useful practices for practitioners.