Motivation in software engineering: A systematic review update

Background/Aim - Given the relevance and importance that the understanding of motivation has gained in the field of software engineering, this work was carried out in order to update the results of a literature review carried out in 2006 on motivation in software engineering. Method - Based on guidelines for this specific type of study, we replicated the original study protocol. Results - The combination of manual and automatic searches retrieved 6,534 papers, of which 53 relevant papers were selected for data extraction and analysis. Conclusions - Studies address motivation using several viewpoints and approaches and, even though the number of researches increased in this area, the overall understanding of what actually motivates software engineers does not seem to have significantly advanced in the last five years.