The Innovation Sources in Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

During the last century many researches on the business, marketing and technology fields have developed the innovation research line and large amount of knowledge can be found in the literature. Currently, the importance of systematic and openness approaches to manage the available innovation sources is well established in many knowledge fields. Also in the software engineering sector, where the organizations need to absorb and to exploit as much innovative ideas as possible to get success in the current competitive environment.

This Master Thesis presents an study related with the innovation sources in the software engineering eld. The main research goals of this work are the identication and the relevance assessment of the available innovation sources
and the understanding of the trends on the innovation sources usage. Firstly, a general review of the literature have been conducted in order to define the research area and to identify research gaps. Secondly, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been proposed as the research method in this work to report reliable conclusions collecting systematically quality evidences about the
innovation sources in software engineering field.

This contribution provides resources, built-on empirical studies included in the SLR, to support a systematic identication and an adequate exploitation of the innovation sources most suitable in the software engineering field. Several artefacts such as lists, taxonomies and relevance assessments of the innovation sources most suitable for software engineering have been built, and their usage
trends in the last decades and their particularities on some countries and knowledge fields, especially on the software engineering, have been researched.

This work can facilitate to researchers, managers and practitioners of innovative software organizations the systematization of critical activities on innovation
processes like the identication and exploitation of the most suitable opportunities. Innovation researchers can use the results of this work to conduct research studies involving the innovation sources research area. Whereas, organization
managers and software practitioners can use the provided outcomes in a systematic way to improve their innovation capability, increasing consequently the value creation in the processes that they run to provide products and services
useful to their environment.

In summary, this Master Thesis research the innovation sources in the software engineering field, providing useful resources to support an effective innovation sources management. Moreover, several aspects should be deeply study to increase the accuracy of the presented results and to obtain more resources built-on empirical knowledge. It can be supported by the INno-
vation SOurces MAnagement (InSoMa) framework, which is introduced in this work in order to encourage openness and systematic approaches to identify and to exploit the innovation sources in the software engineering field.