PEx tool evolution to support systematic review

Abstract

Systematic revisions have been adopted in Software Engineering as a way to gather data and information from different experimental studies, allowing the combination of these results to characterise costs and benefits associated with a certain technology or development environment/tool. The process of conducting a systematic revision, although relevant, is costly and, in many situations, slow. One of this process' stages is the selection of primary studies, which gets very difficult when considering a great volume of articles and, consequently, the problems of selecting relevant primary studies for later analysis. The use of Text Mining tools, such as Projection Explorer (PEx), to support the activities of the systematic revision process has been investigated, specifically at the selection of primary studies and analysis stages. The instantiation of Text Mining techniques and tools for specific domains, based on ontologies, may lead to a more effective and efficient systematic revision process. Since the current architecture of PEx doesn't handle ontologies instantiation, the reengineering intends to improve it and provide it's evolution and the insertion of new functionalities in an incremental manner, exploring an incremental reengineering process based on architecture. (AU)