Investigating the use of Snowballing on Gray Literature Reviews
Felipe Gomes, Thiago Mendes, S\'avio Freire, Rodrigo Sp\'inola, Manoel, Mendon\c{c}a

TL;DR
This study explores snowballing techniques on Q&A sites to enhance gray literature reviews in software engineering, demonstrating significant increases in relevant discussion retrieval with practical guidelines for researchers.
Contribution
It introduces and evaluates two snowballing approaches for gray literature reviews on Q&A sites, providing the first analysis of snowballing use in this context.
Findings
One snowballing iteration added 291 discussions, 130 valid for analysis.
Recall increased by approximately 120% over the original data set.
Snowballing achieved similar precision to search-based methods.
Abstract
Background: The use of gray literature (GL) has grown in software engineering research, especially in studies that consider Questions and Answers (Q&A) sites, since software development professionals widely use them. Though snowballing (SB) techniques are standard in systematic literature reviews, little is known about how to apply them to gray literature reviews. Aims: This paper investigates how to use SB approaches on Q&A sites during gray literature reviews to identify new valid discussions for analysis. Method: In previous studies, we compiled and analyzed a set of Stack Exchange Project Management (SEPM) discussions related to software engineering technical debt (TD). Those studies used a data set consisting of 108 valid discussions extracted from SEPM. Based on this start data set, we perform forward and backward SB using two different approaches: link-based and similarity-based…
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Taxonomy
TopicsExpert finding and Q&A systems · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices · Software Engineering Research
