A Tertiary and Secondary Study Canvas
This work addresses the problem of simplifying systematic literature reviews and mappings for software engineering researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing protocols without introducing a new paradigm.
The authors tackled the challenge of conducting secondary and tertiary studies in software engineering, which are labor-intensive and involve complex protocol development, by proposing a Secondary and Tertiary Study Canvas to simplify and clarify the steps in the process, including protocol development, through a synthesized canvas format and step-based approach.
Over the past years, more secondary (Systematic Literature Reviews and Systematic Mappings) and tertiary studies have been conducted. Their conduction is considered a quite large task and labor-intensive since it involves a detailed process including a protocol development, which is one of the most challenging phase reported by the software engineering research community. In this scenario, we propose a Secondary and Tertiary Study Canvas aiming to simplify and clarify the understanding of the steps that need to be performed during the secondary and tertiary process conduction, including the protocol development. For this, we synthesized and organized the existing secondary studies' protocols in a Canvas format as well as suggesting a step-based approach to assist the secondary and tertiary studies' conduction.