One of the objectives of knowledge management is knowledge transfer. In software development projects, collaborative work is the key to teamwork. These projects are classified as knowledge-intensive, and their activities are related to the materialization of an organization’s knowledge. Therefore, software development teams require knowledge transfer capabilities. However, there are difficulties associated with communication and collaboration that create challenges for software development teams and require mitigation. One way to mitigate such problems is the use of gamification. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of the literature to identify gamification based strategies that encourage knowledge transfer from software development teams. These strategies were classified, and interesting approaches were found to identify gamification as a key strategy for software development teams. The use of gamification achieves positive results in the generation of knowledge transfer capabilities in software development teams. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.