Context: There has been an increase in research into global software development (GSD) and in the number of systematic literature reviews (SLRs) addressing this topic. Objective: The aim of this research is to catalogue GSD SLRs in order to identify the topics covered, the active researchers, the publication vehicles, and to assess the quality of the SLRs identified. Method: We performed a broad automated search to find SLRs dealing with GSD. We differentiate between SLR studies and papers reporting those studies. Data relating to each of the following was extracted and synthesized from each study: authors and their affiliation at the time of publication, the journal or conference in which the paper was published, the quality of each study and the main GSD study topic. Results: Twenty-four GSD SLR studies and 37 papers reporting those studies were identified. Major GSD topics covered include: (1) organizational environment, (2) project execution, and (3) project planning and control. The main research groups are based in Brazil (17), Ireland (8), and Sweden (7). Conclusions: GSD SLR studies are most frequently reported in the International Conference on Global Software Engineering and IEEE Software; the two most popular topics for research are risk factors due to the organizational environment and the development process. The most active researchers are based in Brazil. The quality of the SLR studies has not changed over time.

The aims of this research were to investigate the applicability of the systematic literature review (SLR) process within the constraints of a 13-week masterpsilas level project and to aggregate evidence about the effectiveness of pair programming for teaching introductory programming. It was found that, with certain modifications to the process, it was possible to undertake an SLR within a limited time period and to produce valid results. Based on pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, the student found 28 publications reporting empirical studies of pair programming, of which nine publications were used for data extraction and analysis. Results of the review indicates that whilst pair programming has little effect on the marks obtained for examinations and assignments, it can significantly improve the pass and retention rates and the studentspsila confidence and enjoyment of programming. Following the student study, experienced reviewers re-applied the inclusion and exclusion criteria to the 28 publications and carried out data extraction and synthesis using the resulting papers. A comparison of the studentpsilas results and those of the experienced reviewers is presented.

This study aims to compare the use of targeted manual searches with broad automated searches, and to assess the importance of grey literature and breadth of search on the outcomes of SLRs. We used a participant-observer multi-case embedded case study. Our two cases were a tertiary study of systematic literature reviews published between January 2004 and June 2007 based on a manual search of selected journals and conferences and a replication of that study based on a broad automated search. Broad searches find more papers than restricted searches, but the papers may be of poor quality. Researchers undertaking SLRs may be justified in using targeted manual searches if they intend to omit low quality papers; if publication bias is not an issue; or if they are assessing research trends in research methodologies.

There is little empirical knowledge of the effectiveness of the object-oriented paradigm. To conduct a systematic review of the literature describing empirical studies of this paradigm. We undertook a Mapping Study of the literature. 138 papers have been identified and classified by topic, form of study involved, and source. The majority of empirical studies of OO (object oriented software) concentrate on metrics, relatively few consider effectiveness.

A consequence of the growing number of empirical studies in software engineering is the need to adopt systematic approaches to assessing and aggregating research outcomes in order to provide a balanced and objective summary of research evidence for a particular topic. The paper reports experiences with applying one such approach, the practice of systematic literature review, to the published studies relevant to topics within the software engineering domain. The systematic literature review process is summarised, a number of reviews being undertaken by the authors and others are described and some lessons about the applicability of this practice to software engineering are extracted. The basic systematic literature review process seems appropriate to software engineering and the preparation and validation of a review protocol in advance of a review activity is especially valuable. The paper highlights areas where some adaptation of the process to accommodate the domain-specific characteristics of software engineering is needed as well as areas where improvements to current software engineering infrastructure and practices would enhance its applicability. In particular, infrastructure support provided by software engineering indexing databases is inadequate. Also, the quality of abstracts is poor; it is usually not possible to judge the relevance of a study from a review of the abstract alone.

We discuss what constitutes a 'software service model' and propose a framework that can accommodate both component-based and service-based systems, while also distinguishing between 'static' and 'dynamic' forms of service delivery. We then draw upon this, and upon our own experiences of developing service-based forms, to consider what characteristics a service architecture might possess

This paper reports on our experiences with using the emerging Web service technologies and tools to create a demonstration information broker system as part of our research into information management in a distributed environment. To provide a realistic context, we chose to study the use of information in the healthcare domain, and this context sets some challenging parameters and constraints for our research and for the demonstration system. In this paper, we both report on the extent to which existing Web service technologies have proved to be mature enough to meet these requirements, and also assess their current limitations.

We address the problem of large-scale data integration, where the data sources are unknown at design time, are from autonomous organisations, and may evolve. Experiments are described involving a demonstrator system in the field of health services data integration within the UK. Current Web services technology has been used extensively and largely successfully in these distributed prototype systems. The work shows that Web services provide a good infrastructure layer, but integration demands a higher level "broker" architectural layer; the paper identifies eight specific requirements for such an architecture that have emerged from the experiments, derived from an analysis of shortcomings which are collectively due to the static nature of the initial prototype. The way in which these are being met in the current version in order to achieve a more dynamic integration is described.

Effective use of heterogeneous, distributed information in a coherent, integrated fashion has long been a "holy grail". The UK Health and Social care domain is an example where a global view is needed to facilitate decision making, whilst having ethical and legal concerns. The IBHIS project aims to provide an integrated broker that enables coherent use of a set of distributed, heterogeneous data sources, whilst ensuring trustworthiness and audit. This paper presents a service-oriented federated architecture for the IBHIS broker.