A Systematic Review of Automated Software Engineering

Abstract

Context: Automated software engineering is becoming an increasingly important part of Software Engineering. Both fully and partially automated approaches and methods can improve the productivity and quality of software development. Objective: The goal of this study is to identify the current status of the automated software engineering field based on publications in the years 1999 to 2009. The results should be valuable for people who are assessing which automated approaches and methods to implement in their software development. Method: The method used in this study is a systematic review. It is a well-defined method, which can be used to identify, analyze, synthesize, evaluate and compare available and relevant articles on a specific research topic. The attributes and characteristics to extract for each automated approach/method was based on a partial literature in the field and related software engineering fields concerned with automation of human activities. Results: From the 122 published articles selected in the final stage of paper screening and filtering we found 127 automated approaches distributed on 9 areas of Software Engineering. We also provide analysis of these approaches based on the years of publication, automation level of the proposed automated approaches, human activity required for using each approach and their types. Conclusion: Software design was the most prevalent area for research in automated software engineering from 1999 to 2009. Furthermore, 39.4% of automated approaches were deemed as having a low automation level, indicating that much manual work was still left for utilizing the technique. Meanwhile, only a total of 22 required human activities were mentioned for the 127 automated approaches, which indicates that researchers focus on the automation approaches themselves but neglect to consider the level of automation they supply as well as the human activities that are still needed when using them.