A significant increase has been noted in the application of gamification design interventions in programming education, which sparked enthusiasm in students and enhanced their levels of enjoyment and engagement, while improving learning outcomes. By utilizing gamified learning activities and software applications, instructors can develop learning environments which greatly enhance the experiences of student interaction in gamified learning environments. Positive reported experiences of students in higher education programming learning environments, promise to steer students towards achievement in their programming pursuits. However, it is not clear if these positive reports might be inaccurate due to various inadequacies in research methodologies used in studies conducted in a gamified programming learning higher education context. To date, no systematic review has focused specifically on the methodological rigor of studies that investigated the gamification of higher education programming courses. The systematic literature review reported by this study, fills this gap, by exposing various methodological shortcomings observed in the reviewed literature. The study provides recommendations to researchers to improve research efforts in the future. The hope is that these guidelines will contribute to enhancing the overall quality and reliability of research findings related to the gamification of higher education programming courses.