A Systematic Mapping Study on Software Quality Control Techniques for Assessing Privacy in Information Systems

Software Quality Control (SQC) techniques are widely used throughout the software development process with the objective of assessing and detecting anomalies that affect the quality of an information system. Privacy is one quality attribute of software systems for which several SQC techniques have been proposed in recent years. However, research has been carried out from different perspectives and, consequently, it has led to a growing body of knowledge scattered across different domains. To bridge this gap, we have carried out a systematic mapping study to provide practitioners and researchers with an overview of the state-of-the-art techniques to carry out software quality control of information systems focusing on aspects of privacy. Our results show a steady growth in the research efforts in this field. The European General Data Protection Regulation seems to have a significant influence on this growth, since 37 & x0025; of techniques that focus on assessing compliance derive their assessment criteria from this legal framework. The maturity of the techniques varies between the type of technique: Formal verification techniques exhibit the lowest level of maturity while the combination of techniques has demonstrated its successful application in real-world scenarios. The latter seems a promising avenue of research as it provides better results in terms of coverage, precision and effectiveness than the application of individual, isolated techniques. In this paper, we describe the existing SQC techniques focusing on privacy and provide a suitable basis for identifying future research directions.