Context:

The adoption of Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is usually only based on its theoretical benefits instead of empirical evidences. In fact, there is no work that synthesizes the empirical studies on SPLE. This makes it difficult for researchers to base their contributions on previous works validated with an empirical strategy.

Objective:

The objective of this work is to discover and summarize the studies that have used empirical evidences in SPLE limited to those ones with the intervention of humans. This will allow evaluating the quality and to know the scope of these studies over time. Doing so, research opportunities can arise

Methods:

A systematic literature review was conducted. The scope of the work focuses on those studies in which there is human intervention and were published between 2000 and 2018. We considered peer-reviewed papers from journals and top software engineering conferences.

Results:

Out of a total of 1880 studies in the initial set, a total of 62 primary studies were selected after applying a series of inclusion and exclusion criteria. We found that, approximately 56% of the studies used the empirical case study strategy while the rest used experimental strategies. Around 86% of the case studies were performed in an industrial environment showing the penetration of SPLE in industry.

Conclusion:

The interest of empirical studies has been growing since 2008. Around 95.16% of the studies address aspects related to domain engineering while application engineering received less attention. Most of the experiments and case study evaluated showed an acceptable level of quality. The first study found dates from 2005 and since then, the interest in the empirical SPLE has increased.

中文翻译：

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实证软件产品线工程：系统文献综述

内容：

软件产品线工程（SPLE）的采用通常仅基于其理论收益，而不是经验证据。实际上，没有任何工作可以综合有关SPLE的实证研究。这使得研究人员很难将他们的贡献建立在经过经验策略验证的以前的工作上。

目的：

这项工作的目的是发现和总结在SPLE中使用经验证据的研究，这些研究仅限于那些在人类干预下的经验证据。这样可以评估质量并了解这些研究的范围。这样做会产生研究机会

方法：

进行了系统的文献综述。工作范围集中在2000年至2018年之间发表的涉及人为干预的研究。我们考虑了来自期刊和顶级软件工程会议的经过同行评审的论文。

结果：

在最初的1880项研究中，采用一系列纳入和排除标准后，总共选择了62项初级研究。我们发现，大约56％的研究使用了经验案例研究策略，而其余的则使用了实验策略。约有86％的案例研究是在工业环境中进行的，显示了SPLE在工业中的渗透。

结论：

自2008年以来，对实证研究的兴趣一直在增长。大约95.16％的研究涉及与领域工程相关的方面，而应用工程则受到较少的关注。评估的大多数实验和案例研究显示了可接受的质量水平。发现的第一项研究始于2005年，此后，对经验SPLE的兴趣增加了。