Systematizing the Meta-Analytical Process in Software Engineering

The generalization of knowledge is a necessary part of every scientific field. Meta-analysis is already advocated as a tool for generalization in different areas such as medicine, psychology, business, and this process is already standardized for them. Software engineering started using meta-analysis as a tool for aggregating results from families of experiments, but not so long for generalization of results coming from different studies, and for this purpose, the meta-analytical approach is not yet clarified. In this paper, we attempt to systematize the application of meta-analysis as a secondary study to the software engineering field suggesting our preliminary protocol. To see the reliability of the proposed protocol we conducted several studies using it. Following even uniform protocol with these studies, we identified the issues preventing the wide usage of meta-analysis in software engineering and proposed our solutions for them.