Behavioral software engineering: A definition and systematic literature review

• We present behavioral SE (BSE) and a systematic literature review.
• Result shows gaps in existing research; it has focused on only a few BSE concepts.
• BSE studies rarely consider multiple levels and focus on only a few concepts.
• Even though a majority of BSE research is empirical, few papers are experiments.
• This paper can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda.

Throughout the history of software engineering, the human aspects have repeatedly been recognized as important. Even though research that investigates them has been growing in the past decade, these aspects should be more generally considered.The main objective of this study is to clarify the research area concerned with human aspects of software engineering and to create a common platform for future research. In order to meet the objective, we propose a definition of the research area behavioral software engineering (BSE) and present results from a systematic literature review based on the definition.The result indicates that there are knowledge gaps in the research area of behavioral software engineering and that earlier research has been focused on a few concepts, which have been applied to a limited number of software engineering areas. The individual studies have typically had a narrow perspective focusing on few concepts from a single unit of analysis. Further, the research has rarely been conducted in collaboration by researchers from both software engineering and social science.Altogether, this review can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda for future software engineering research and practice.