This paper presents a systematic literature review performed to investigate if there is a prevailing definition of reference implementation in the standards community, and how reference implementations are referenced to be used within the standards community. The literature review targets all electronically available core journals and conferences in the field, and the results are classified according to a framework introduced in the paper. We found that there is one definition that focuses on conformance testing, but the results from the literature review show more uses of reference implementations such as when developing standards, when implementing them, and when developing products.
978-3-86073-305-2