Software as storytelling: A systematic literature review

Storytelling has always been a crucial, perhaps constitutive part of our lives. All communities have told stories. In recent years, software development is becoming increasingly recognized as a creative process that has a lot in common with the process of writing or telling a story. Aim: The objectives of this paper are: (a) to review and aptly classify current principles and approaches that describe software development as a form of storytelling; (b) to describe and understand the heuristic function of storytelling in software development; and (c) to discuss and single out the principles of storytelling that may play a role, hence constitute significant improvements to the practices of software developers. Method: To achieve these goals and objectives we conducted a systematic literature review of relevant scientific papers and subsequently analyzed them by means of a textual narrative synthesis. Results: More specifically, we retrieved, screened and examined 51 relevant publications. The synthesis we conducted allowed us to understand and better visualize the many interesting correspondences and analogies between those two seemingly different processes, namely storytelling and software development. In particular, in our work, we focused on describing and analyzing how certain principles underlying storytelling can be adapted and applied in current practices of software engineering. Conclusion: This paper presents and re-elaborates in a critical fashion and from a different angle a substantial body of knowledge and research recently carried out in the software development literature.