Context: Empirical studies are gaining recognition in the Software Engineering (SE) research community. In order to foster empirical research, it is essential understand the environments, guidelines, process, and other mechanisms available to support these studies in SE. Goal: Identifying the mechanisms used to support the empirical strategies adopted by the researches in the major Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) scientific venues. Method: We performed a systematic mapping study that included all full papers published at EASE, ESEM and ESEJ since their first editions. A total of 898 studies were selected. Results: We provide the full list of identified support mechanisms and the strategies that uses them. The most commonly mechanisms used to support the empirical strategies were two sets of guidelines, one to secondary studies and another to experiments. The most reported empirical strategies are experiments and case studies. Conclusions: The use of empirical methods in SE has increased over the years but many studies do not apply these methods nor use mechanisms to guide their research. Therefore, the list of support mechanisms, where and how they were applied is a major asset to the SE community. Such asset can foster empirical studies aiding the choice regarding which strategies and mechanisms to use in a research. Also, we identified new perspectives and gaps that foster the development of resources to aid empirical studies.
Background: Along the last decade, there has been a significant increase in the adoption of the approaches based on Distributed Software Development (DSD). This approach has brought several competitive advantages, as well as new challenges such as communication and information sharing. In this context, the ontologies can provide benefits such as the definition, standardization and sharing of knowledge involved in the project, allowing a uniform understanding of information and facilitating the collaboration among distributed software development teams. Aim: Identifying evidence to determine which tools, models, techniques and best practices that use ontologies to support the DSD projects, and which ontologies proposed in this context. Method: This paper presents a systematic mapping study conducted in order to investigate how ontologies are being applied as a support to the DSD. The research protocol was based on Kitchenham's, and Travassos and Biolchini's guidelines. Searches were performed both in manual and automatic way in a set of digital libraries engines and leading conferences in the Software Engineering field. Results: From the initial set of 1588 studies, it was selected a total of 38 primary studies that answer the two research questions. Conclusions: This work presents evidences from each paper collected and an analysis of results reached. The results support the foundation for proposing and developing a feature based on ontologies to support the DSD, besides encouraging further researches that may promote advancements in this area and fostering the adoption of these types of resources by the global software industry.
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