Vision for SLR tooling infrastructure: Prioritizing value-added requirements

Context Even with the increasing use of Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) in software engineering (SE), there are still a number of barriers faced by SLR authors. These barriers increase the cost of conducting SLRs. Objective For many of these barriers, appropriate tool support could reduce their impact. In this paper, we use interactions with the SLR community in SE to identify and prioritize a set of requirements for SLR tooling infrastructure. Method This paper analyzes and combines the results from three studies on SLR process barriers and SLR tool requirements to produce a prioritized list of functional requirements for SLR tool support. Using this list of requirements, we perform a feature analysis of the current SLR support tools to identify requirements that are supported as well as identify the need for additional tooling infrastructure. Results The analysis resulted in a list 112 detailed requirements (consolidated into a set of composite requirements) that SE community desires in SLR support tools. The requirements span all the phases of the SLR process. The results show that, while recent tools cover more of the requirements, there are a number of high-priority requirements that are not yet fully covered by any of the existing tools. Conclusion The existing set of SLR tools do not cover all the requirements posed by the community. The list of requirements in this paper is useful for tool developers and researchers wishing to provide support to the SLR community with SE.