A Tertiary and Secondary Study Canvas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Study Canvas to streamline and clarify the complex process of conducting secondary and tertiary research studies in software engineering, including protocol development.

Contribution

It proposes a structured Canvas and step-based approach to simplify the conduction of secondary and tertiary studies, synthesizing existing protocols.

Findings

Organized existing protocols into a clear Canvas format

Suggested a step-by-step approach for conducting secondary and tertiary studies

Aimed to reduce effort and improve clarity in study conduction processes

Abstract

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.