Guidelines for snowballing in systematic literature studies and a replication in software engineering

Systematic literature studies have become common in software engineering, and hence it is important to understand how to conduct them efficiently and reliably. This paper presents guidelines for conducting literature reviews using a snowballing approach, and they are illustrated and evaluated by replicating a published systematic literature review. The guidelines are based on the experience from conducting several systematic literature reviews and experimenting with different approaches.
Results of the study showed that the guidelines for using snowballing as a way to search for relevant literature was successfully applied to a systematic literature review. It is concluded that using snowballing, as a first search strategy, may very well be a good alternative to the use of database searches.