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Systematic literature studies are commonly used in software engineering. There are two main ways of conducting the searches for these type of studies; they are snowballing and database searches. In snowballing, the reference list (backward snowballing - BSB) and citations (forward snowballing - FSB) of relevant papers are reviewed to identify new papers whereas in a database search, different databases are searched using predefined search strings to identify new papers. Snowballing has not been in use as extensively as database search. Hence it is important to evaluate its efficiency and reliability when being used as a search strategy in literature studies. Moreover, it is important to compare it to database searches. In this paper, we applied snowballing in a literature study, and reflected on the outcome. We also compared database search with backward and forward …