Leadership Teaching in Agile Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping

Nicolas Nascimento, Afonso Sales, Rafael Chanin

2025

Abstract

The software industry is characterized by an environment of uncertainty, high volatility, and constant change. This context has shaped the industry, its components, and actors, generating methodologies capable of meeting both market expectations and software development requirements. Among these methodologies, agile has been the most widely adopted — it provides teams with an overarching set of practices to manage software development project requirements while maintaining flexibility to incorporate changes that the business environment presents. However, professionals equipped with the necessary skills to work in these Agile teams, often referred to as “soft skills”, pose a challenge for universities to teach. From this set of skills, leadership, in particular, has recently garnered attention from the software engineering education community but remains an open research opportunity. In this context, this work aims at creating a body of knowledge regarding leadership teaching in agile software engineering. To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic mapping. From a selection of 27 studies, our results provide indications that: (i) leadership in software engineering education is typically defined as part of teamwork, shared among team members, associated with Scrum, and applied to provide students with experience in group representation; and (ii) it is usually taught through Scrum, involving active learning methodologies (such as problem-based learning) and employing real projects either sourced from external partners or designed to solve real-world problems.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Nascimento N., Sales A. and Chanin R. (2025). Leadership Teaching in Agile Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU; ISBN 978-989-758-746-7, SciTePress, pages 469-480. DOI: 10.5220/0013196600003932

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu25,
author={Nicolas Nascimento and Afonso Sales and Rafael Chanin},
title={Leadership Teaching in Agile Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU},
year={2025},
pages={469-480},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013196600003932},
isbn={978-989-758-746-7},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 2: CSEDU
TI - Leadership Teaching in Agile Software Engineering: A Systematic Mapping
SN - 978-989-758-746-7
AU - Nascimento N.
AU - Sales A.
AU - Chanin R.
PY - 2025
SP - 469
EP - 480
DO - 10.5220/0013196600003932
PB - SciTePress