Assessing Barriers and Facilitators to Evidence Use in Decisions : A Tertiary and Interview Study

Context. Decision-making is a significant step in development process of software engineering. Evidence-based Software Engineering has been one of the strategies attempting to facilitate decision-making process. It follows process of gathering suitable evidence in the aim of making a viable use the evidence. Objectives. In this study, evidence use in practice was mainly focused as a part of which barriers and facilitators concerning it were aspired to be obtained from the practitioners. Concerning existing evidence, it was also aimed in finding out and gathering the existing evidence in software engineering, as a contribution to the evidence use in practice. Methods. To obtain the outcomes for the specified objectives, an extensive tertiary study and 18 interviews were conducted. The tertiary study was replication of study by Kitchenham et al. [1]. It was also an updated version for the years of 2010 to 2016. The interviews were conducted among the software practitioners from several types of industries and regions. Results. 67 SLRs were analysed and extracted to gather and obtain existing evidence. 18 interviews were conducted among software practitioners to assess barriers and facilitators to evidence use in making decisions. Conclusions. We conclude from results of tertiary study that the research studies in every sub-domain are available under software engineering and are even increasing year by year. From the analysed results of the semi-structured interviews, it was clear that the implementation of research results in practice is inter-dependant on many major as well as trivial factors concerning the practitioners. Reference [1] B. Kitchenham et al., “Systematic literature reviews in software engineering – A tertiary study,” Inf. Softw. Technol., vol. 52, no. 8, pp. 792–805, Aug. 2010