Systematic literature review on agile software development: A tertiary study with social network analysis

Agile software development is defined as an inclusive term for a range of methods and processes based on the agile software development manifesto and the values and principles declared in the 12 principles behind it. Agile methods include applications such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, or Feature-Based Development. Following the announcement of the Agile Manifesto by a group of software development experts in 2001, many researchers have examined agile software development and produced several publications. The increasing number of publications has led to the need to examine the progress made in the field of agile software development in a systematical way, and researchers have turned to secondary and then tertiary studies. While the primary studies are analyzed systematically in secondary studies, secondary studies are systematically examined in tertiary studies. Social network analysis, on the other hand, appeared with the introduction of the concept of sociogram in 1937. It is the process of examining social structures with networks and graph theory. The purpose of social network analysis is to understand by mapping the relationships that connect them as a network and then by revealing key individuals, groups within the network and / or relationships between individuals. Nowadays, with the development of computer technology and the emergence of powerful social network analysis tools, it has received great interest in engineering. The aim of this study is to examine a systematic literature review published in the field of Agile Software Development between 2013 and 2018 and to investigate the relations between secondary studies examined with the help of social network analysis. Two-stage research method was applied in the scope of the study; (1) published systematic literature surveys in the field of agile software development were collected from Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus and IEEE academic databases, and (2) the publications reviewed were visualized with VOSviewer and Gephi social network analysis tools. Sources and relations between countries were put forward. The findings of the study indicate that developing countries have more studies on the subject, and that the cited publications are mostly from developed countries; contrary to expectations, geographically far away countries are cooperating rather than close countries; the number of publications is not directly proportional to the citations.