Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades: frameworks are proposed, success factors are studied, and experiences have been reported. However, the sheer mass of concepts, approaches, and standards published over the years overwhelms practitioners as well as researchers. What is out there? Are there new emerging approaches? What are open issues? Still, we struggle to answer the question for what is the current state of SPI and related research? In this paper, we present initial results from a systematic mapping study to shed light on the field of SPI and to draw conclusions for future research directions. An analysis of 635 publications draws a big picture of SPI-related research of the past 25 years. Our study shows a high number of solution proposals, experience reports, and secondary studies, but only few theories. In particular, standard SPI models like CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504 are analyzed, enhanced, and evaluated for applicability, whereas these standards are critically discussed from the perspective of SPI in smallto-medium-sized companies, which leads to new specialized frameworks. Furthermore, we find a growing interest in success factors to aid companies in conducting SPI.
Background: Even though a number of tools are reported to be used by researchers undertaking systematic reviews, important shortages are still reported revealing how such solutions are unable to satisfy current needs. Method: Two research groups independently provided a design for a tool supporting systematic reviews. The resulting tools were assessed against the feature lists provided by prior research. Results: After presenting an overview of the tools and the core design decisions taken, we provide a feature analysis and a discussion regarding selected challenges deemed crucial to provide a proper tool support. Conclusions: Although the designed solutions do not yet support the entire systematic review process, their architecture has been designed to be flexible and extendable. After highlighting the difficulties of developing appropriate tools, we call for action: developing tools to support systematic reviews is a community project.
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