A survey of secondary studies in software process improvement

Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become one of the main strategic objectives in software industry. Companies make more investments in implementing software quality standards and models that focus on process assessment to improve their performance and productivity. To achieve these goals, companies focus on improving their process by means of improvement initiatives which may be implemented. To help practitioners find more innovative ways to manage and implement software process improvement initiatives efficiently, an important number of studies related to this topic have been emerged in recent years. Some of them, referred to as secondary studies, focused on the interpretation and synthesis of available published research works by giving an up to date state of art about SPI. This state of the art is provided in a form of literature surveys or in a methodological form using well established approaches such as systematic reviews or systematic mappings or tertiary studies. The objective of this paper is to identify and present the current secondary studies on SPI. The purpose is to discuss methods that these literature reviews of SPI use, their quality, and specific subjects that they cover. A set of survey research questions have been proposed and discussed through the investigation of 70 selected secondary studies collected from different digital libraries. The results show that success factors and issues related to implementation of SPI initiatives are the most studied, and there is a need to address in depth the measurement aspects in SPI.