Design Thinking Integrated in Agile Software Development: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Software development raises the relevance as it enables automation of the processes and provides new functionalities to the final consumers; Agile Software Development is an enabler to accelerate software delivery, manage priorities changes and increase productivity. During the software development life cycle, the development team is expected to fully understand customers’ needs, but it is challenged by geographic constraints, narrow project schedule, or short budget. Design Thinking is an approach that promotes the understanding of customer needs considering what is technical and economic feasible. To evaluate how the Design Thinking approach is used integrated with Agile Software Development methodologies, we applied the Systematic Literature Review, which collected, categorized and reviewed 29 articles related to this topic. The results show that most of the integrated models are applied throughout the software life cycle, noting that the model that integrates the DT approach published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Scrum as an agile methodology composes the most frequently used integrated model. The integrated models resulted in a greater approximation of end users and the development team, improving the quality and usability of the software.