Using Q&A Websites as a Method for Assessing Systematic Reviews

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.