ABSTRACT Context Rapid Reviews are secondary studies aiming to deliver evidence to experts in a more timely manner and with lower costs than traditional literature reviews. Previous studies have shown that experts and researchers are positive toward Rapid Reviews. However, little is known about how Rapid Reviews differ from traditional Systematic Reviews. Objective The goal of this paper is to compare a Rapid Review with a Systematic Review in terms of their methods (e.g., search strategy, study selection, quality assessment, and data extraction) and findings to understand how optimizing the traditional Systematic Review method impacts what we obtain with Rapid Review. Method To achieve this goal, we conducted a Systematic Review with the same research questions answered by a pre‐existing Rapid Review and compared those two studies. Also, we surveyed experts from industry and academia to evaluate the relevance of the findings obtained from both the secondary studies. Results The Rapid Review lasted 6 days, while the Systematic Review took 1 year and 2 months. The main bottlenecks we identified in the Systematic Review are (i) executing the search strategy and (ii) selecting the procedure. Together, they took 10 months. The researchers had to analyze the information from 11,383 papers for the Systematic Review compared with 1973 for the Rapid Review. Still, most ( 78%) of the papers included in the Systematic Review were returned by the Rapid Review search, and some papers that could be included were unduly excluded during the Rapid Review's selection procedure. Both secondary studies identified the same number of pieces of evidence (30), but the pieces of evidence are not the same. Conclusion The Rapid Review and Systematic Review results are inherently different and complementary. The time and cost to conduct a Systematic Review can be prohibitive in experts' contexts. Thus, at least in such situations, a Rapid Review may be an adequate choice. Moreover, a Rapid Review may be executed in the experts' context as a previous low‐cost step before deciding to invest in a high‐cost Systematic Review.

Context: Multivocal Literature Reviews (MLR) search for evidence in both Traditional Literature (TL) and Grey Literature (GL). Despite the growing interest in MLR-based studies, the literature assessing how GL has contributed to MLR studies is still scarce. Objective: This research aims to assess how the use of GL contributed to MLR studies. By contributing, we mean, understanding to what extent GL is providing evidence that is indeed used by an MLR to answer its research question. Method: We start by conducting a tertiary study to identify MLR studies published between 2017 and 2019, selecting nine of them. We then identified the GL used in these studies and assessed to what extent the GLs are providing evidence that help these studies to answer their research questions. Results: Our analysis identified that 1) GL provided evidence not found in TL, 2) most of the GL sources were used to provide recommendations to solve problems, explain a topic, and classify the findings, and 3) 19 different GL types were used in the studies; these GLs were mainly produced by SE practitioners (including blog posts, slides presentations, or project descriptions). Conclusions: We evidence how GL contributed to MLR studies. We observed that if these GLs were not included in the MLR, several findings would have been omitted or weakened. We also described the challenges involved when conducting this investigation, along with potential ways to deal with them, which may help future SE researchers.

Context: For more than 15 years, Agile Software Development (ASD) has been used to improve software development, process, and quality. However, there are scenarios where the effectiveness of these methods and practices has not been rigorously evaluated.

Questions and Answers (Q&A) websites maintain a long history of needs, problems, and challenges that software developers face. In contrast to Q&A websites, which are strongly tied to practitioners' needs, there are systematic reviews (SRs), which, according to recent studies, lack a connection with software engineering practice. In this paper, we investigate this claim by assessing to what extent systematic reviews help to solve questions posted on Q&A websites. To achieve this goal, we propose and evaluate a coverage method. We applied this method to a set of more than 600 questions related to agile software development. Results suggest that 12% of the related questions were covered. When considering specific agile methods, the majority of them have coverage below 50% or were not covered at all. We also identified 27 recurrent questions.