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Context: Interest in global software development (GSD) has led to the publication of numerous studies. Over time, these studies should be updated to verify if their findings and conclusions remain valid. Objective: To update a tertiary study, published in 2014, focused on investigating risks and risk mitigation advice in the context of GSD. Method: We conducted a systematic literature study based on forward snowballing, out of which we identified and selected 25 unique studies. Results: We extracted: (a) 118 risks (75 of which already identified in the original work), and (b) 167 mitigation advice (44 of which were identified in the original work). Out of 43 new risks identified, just 10 are specific to GSD settings; the others are risks of the software process described in the context of GSD. The evidence supporting these risks and mitigation were extracted from 619 and 389 primary sources, respectively. Given the amount of evidence found, we have reported only those with higher empirical support. The raw data is available online as complementary material. Conclusions: Interest in GSD, its potential risks, and mitigation strategies, remains high. This update has allowed increasing the level of empirical support provided by the findings of the original work.

Context: The term software reuse was first used in 1968 at the NATO conference. Since then, work in the scientific literature have stated that the application of software reuse offers benefits such as increase in quality and productivity. Nonetheless, in spite of many publications reporting software reuse experiences, evidence that such benefits having reached industrial settings is scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the benefits transferred to real-world settings by the application of software reuse strategies. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping study (SMS). Our search strategies retrieved a set of 2,413 papers out of which 49 were selected as primary studies. We defined five facets to classify these studies: a) the type of benefit, b) the reuse process, c) the industry's domain, d) the type of reuse and e) the type of research reported. Results: Quality increase (28 papers) and Productivity increase (25 papers) were the two most mentioned benefits. Component-Based Development (CBD) was the most reported reuse strategy (41%), followed by Software Product Lines (SPL, 30%). The selected papers mentioned fourteen industrial domains, of which four stand out: aerospace and defense, telecommunications, electronics and IT services. The application of systematic reuse was reported in 78% of the papers. Regarding the research type, 50% use evaluation research as the investigation method. Finally, 13 papers (27%) reported validity threats for the research method applied. Conclusions: The literature analyzed presents a lack of empirical data, making it difficult to evaluate the effective transfer of benefits to the industry. This work did not find any relationship between the reported benefits and the reuse strategy applied by the industry or the industry domain. Although the most reported research method was industrial case studies (25 works), half of these works (12) did not report threats to validity.

Context: The use of controlled vocabularies (CVs) aims to increase the quality of the specifications of the software requirements, by producing well-written documentation to reduce both ambiguities and complexity. Many studies suggest that defects introduced at the requirements engineering (RE) phase have a negative impact, significantly higher than defects in the later stages of the software development lifecycle. However, the knowledge we have about the impact of using CVs, in specific RE activities, is very scarce. Objective: To identify and classify the type of CVs, and the impact they have on the requirements engineering phase of software development. Method: A systematic mapping study, collecting empirical evidence that is published up to July 2019. Results: This work identified 2348 papers published pertinent to CVs and RE, but only 90 primary published papers were chosen as relevant. The process of data extraction revealed that 79 studies reported the use of ontologies, whereas the remaining 11 were focused on taxonomies. The activities of RE with greater empirical support were those of specification (29 studies) and elicitation (28 studies). Seventeen different impacts of the CVs on the RE activities were classified and ranked, being the two most cited: guidance and understanding (38%), and automation and tool support (22%). Conclusions: The evolution of the last 10 years in the number of published papers shows that interest in the use of CVs remains high. The research community has a broad representation, distributed across the five continents. Most of the research focuses on the application of ontologies and taxonomies, whereas the use of thesauri and folksonomies is less reported. The evidence demonstrates the usefulness of the CVs in all RE activities, especially during elicitation and specification, helping developers understand, facilitating the automation process and identifying defects, conflicts and ambiguities in the requirements. Collaboration in research between academic and industrial contexts is low and should be promoted.

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