Systematic Studies in Software Product Lines: A Tertiary Study

Software product lines are widely used in the software industries to increase the re-usability and to decrease maintenance cost. On the other hand, systematic reviews are widely used in the software engineering research community to provide the overview of the research field and practitioners guidelines. Researchers have conducted many systematic studies on the different aspects of SPLs. To the best of our knowledge, till now there is no tertiary study conducted on systematic studies of SPL related research topics. In this paper, we aim at conducting a systematic mapping study of existing systematic studies to report the overview of the findings for researchers and practitioners. We performed snowballing and automated search to find out the relevant systematic studies. As a result, we analyzed 60 relevant studies to answer 5 research questions. The main focus of this tertiary study is to highlight the research topics, type of published reviews, active researchers and publication forums. Additionally, we highlight some of the limitations of the systematic studies. The important finding of this study is that the research field is well matured as the systematic studies covered a wide range of research topics. Another important finding is that many studies provided information for practitioners as well as researchers which is a notable improvement in the systematic reviews. However, many studies failed to assess the quality of the primary studies which is the major limitation of the existing systematic studies.