Approaches to strategic alignment of software process improvement: A systematic literature review

•A systematic literature review that combines database search and snowballing.•A list of existing approaches for strategic alignment of SPI.•An assessment of rigor and relevance of empirical studies.•A discussion about the lack of validation of the existing approaches.•A proposal of a research agenda to support the strategic alignment of SPI. Context: Software process improvement (SPI) aims to increase the effectiveness of a software organization. Many studies indicate that the strategic alignment is a critical factor for the SPI success. However, little is known about practical approaches to achieving and maintaining such alignment. Objective: The goal of this study is to evaluate the validation evidence of the existing approaches to the strategic alignment of SPI. Method: We develop a search protocol that combines database search and snowballing to perform the systematic literature review and evaluate empirical studies by applying rigor and relevance criteria. To evaluate the efficiency of our protocol, we use a “quasi-gold standard” to compute the sensitivity and precision of the search. Result: We identified 30 studies (18 empirical) and 19 approaches to strategic alignment of SPI from 495 retrieved studies. Only three out of the 18 empirical studies were rated as high in the categories rigor and relevance, suggesting the need for a stronger validation of the approaches. Conclusion: We conclude that the lack of empirical validation indicates that the results of the existing approaches have not been adequately transferred to practitioners yet, calling for more rigorous studies on the subject.