Maintaining Systematic Literature Reviews: Benefits and Drawbacks

Background: Maintenance and traceability (versioning) are constant concerns in Software Engineering (SE), however, few works related to these topics in Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) were found. Goal: The goal of this research is to elucidate how SLRs can be maintained and what are the benefits and drawbacks in this process. Method: This work presents a survey where experienced researchers that conducted SLRs between 2011 and 2015 answered questions about maintenance and traceability and, using software maintenance concepts, it addresses the SLRs maintenance process. From the 79 e-mails sent we reach 28 answers. Results: 19 of surveyed researchers have shown interest in keeping their SLRs up-to-date, but they have expressed concerns about the effort to be made to accomplish it. It was also observed that 20 participants would be willing to share their SLRs in common repositories, such as GitHub. Conclusions: There is a need to perform maintenance on SLRs. Thus, we are proposing a SLR maintenance process, taking into account some benefits and drawbacks identified during our study and presented through the paper.