Practical agile in higher education: A systematic mapping study

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide evidence that practical Agile applicability into higher education has become a research trend and the means under which it is addressed. A Systematic Mapping Study (SM) has been conducted on 3 research databases. 176 studies (2000–2017) have been selected according to the research protocol and mapped into several distributions. 67% of the selected studies have been published in the past 5 years, with a specific ascending trend between 2013–2017, where Agile Scrum and XP result to be the popular methodologies mostly addressed in software engineering and information science education. Predominantly, studies have been carried out in the form of Evaluation Research and Experience Papers, analyzing practices, methods and human factor implications. From a broader viewpoint, there is background for performing systematic assessments of agile in educational fields, including future scalability to non-academic education (organizational learning, training).