Throughout history, software project management issues have been known to negatively affect the software quality and the success of this type of projects. Faced with such issues, some research have proposed solutions to improve the results in software project management in order to contribute significantly to its success. The objective of this paper is to carry out a study of the context of software project management, identifying the management areas that have been intervened with gamification strategies for software process improvement. To this end, this work proposes a systematic mapping as a research method that facilitates the identification of primary studies to analyze information and classify it based on established research criteria. We found 55 primary studies published between 2011 and 2017, on which we performed an information analysis. This analysis highlights the increase in the number of studies that use gamification as an improvement strategy for software project management processes areas. We classified the selected studies by analyzing the type of research method and the type of publication. This analysis shows that it is still an area of research in development and that it is necessary to continue working on the improvement of software project management processes with the aim of contributing to the success of its results. © 2018 AISTI.