查看文章

Secondary studies are vulnerable to threats to validity. Although, mitigating these threats is crucial for the credibility of these studies, we currently lack a systematic approach to identify, categorize and mitigate threats to validity for secondary studies.

In this paper, we review the corpus of secondary studies, with the aim to identify: (a) the trend of reporting threats to validity, (b) the most common threats to validity and corresponding mitigation actions, and (c) possible categories in which threats to validity can be classified.

To achieve this goal we employ the tertiary study research method that is used for synthesizing knowledge from existing secondary studies. In particular, we collected data from more than 100 studies, published until December 2016 in top quality software engineering venues (both journals and conference).

Our results suggest that in recent years, secondary studies are …