How has design thinking being used and integrated into software development activities? A systematic mapping

Abstract

Software companies have been using Design Thinking (DT) as a user-centered design approach, putting the user at the center of the software development process. In this article, we report a Systematic Mapping Study to investigate the use of DT in software development. We evaluated 127 papers from 2010 to 2021. We analyzed how DT is integrated in software development, what are the models and techniques, what are the criteria used for selecting DT techniques, and what are the key points that DT practitioners should be aware of when using DT. As a result, we identified 3 strategies to integrate DT in software development, 16 models, and 85 techniques. We also found that the selection of techniques is related to the models’ working spaces being performed, and identified 7 criteria used for selecting DT techniques. Furthermore, we summarized 16 key points that DT practitioners should pay attention when using DT, and we proposed 4 takeaways for applying DT in software development Thus, our study contributes to DT practitioners by providing information to be used either as a starting point, or to integrate it into activities already performed by teams, or as a strategy to foster changes in the entire organization’s mindset.