Formalizing a Systematic Review Updating Process

The objective of a systematic review is to obtain empirical evidence about the topic under review and to allow moving forward the body of knowledge of a discipline. Therefore, systematic reviewing is a tool we can apply in Software Engineering to develop well founded guidelines with the final goal of improving the quality of the software systems. However, we still do not have as much experience in performing systematic reviews as in other disciplines like medicine, and therefore we need detailed guidance. This paper presents a proposal of a improved process to perform systematic reviews in software engineering. This process is the result of the tasks carried out in a first review and a subsequent update concerning the effectiveness of elicitation techniques.