Software engineering principles: A systematic mapping study and a quantitative literature review

Software engineering, a fairly recent engineering discipline, is still evolving without a wide consensus on a body of fundamental principles as in traditional engineering fields with their own long-established principles originating from physics, chemistry and mathematics. This paper reports on a systematic mapping study (SMS) that identified 30 papers and books from 1969 to January 2020, each proposing their own sets of software engineering principles (SEP). Within these studies a total of 592 SEP were proposed, these studies were reviewed and classified on the basis of four mapping questions examining publication trends, use of explicit criteria for the proposed SEP, whether authors clearly described a methodology to come up with the proposed SEP, and the applicability of SEP throughout the development process. The key finding in this study are: a) the majority of the studies were published over two decades from 1989 to 2009, and then the publication rate slowed in the following decade; b) the largest number of SEP, by far, was proposed by Davis; c) only six studies used explicit criteria to identify their proposed SEP, and the other 24 studies identified their principles based on their own analysis without traceability to a methodology or selection criteria; d) most authors did not identify which principles to use in specific contexts of the software engineering domain; e) only two studies used some of the proposed SEP throughout the software development process.