No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Abstract
Software development is sometimes considered a boring task. To avoid this fact we propose an approach based on the incorporation of game mechanics into Scrum framework, in order to change its use to a more amusing task, by taking advantage of the gamification trend. Gamification is applied to non-game applications and processes, trying to encourage people to adopt them. This work shows a suggestion of Scrum gamification together with an evaluation of the proposed approach in a case study of a software house. The use of this concept can help the software industry to increase the team productivity in a natural way.
... This work is the continuation of a previous work [11] dealing with the introduction of the game design techniques in the context of software development. In the first work, we have shown that software development using Scrum [12] is closely related to a game when the governing rules of both activities are concerned. ...
... There is a parallel between the hierarchy of game challenges and Scrum structuring. As mentioned before, the proposal was made in a previous work, but it is important to detail this proposal here, in order to allow a comprehensive description of the work [11]. In addition, several element-oriented achievements of Scrum and a mapping between elements of RPG games and everyday development context are proposed. ...
Software development, in many moments, is an exciting and challenging activity, but it can present itself as a boring endeavour in others. At the same time, the introduction of game elements into efforts such as the teaching of Software Engineering shows that real-world activities can assemble game design elements and that it can make them more engaging. In this work, it is proposed the introduction of game design elements in software development, especially in the Scrum process. For this, elements are included to stimulate adherence to the prescriptions of the process, besides stimulating the execution of more activities by the team, positively impacting the productivity of a project. The authors present the idealised mechanics and the results obtained from the accomplishment of a case study in a software development team in a private company. Overall, the gamification applied to software development stimulated developers to perform their daily tasks, although this result did not generate strong evidence of increased productivity. © 2019 Institution of Engineering and Technology. All Rights Reserved.
... We conducted a SMS of the literature (Porto et al.,2021) to identify studies that applied gamification to the software development process. From the 103 studies that were selected in the SMS, it is worth highlighting the studies by (Nagwani and Verma, 2012;Medeiros et al., 2015;Dalpiaz et al., 2017;Foucault et al., 2019;Yoshigami et al., 2019;Kolpondinos andGlinz, 2020, andAlexandrova andRapanotti, 2020). In short, such studies mention gamification application examples to improve software development activities, such as engaging the team in the activities defined in the process, involving stakeholders in requirements gathering, motivating good practices and code review, and removing bugs. ...
Context: Improving software quality is a constant challenge in Software Engineering. One way to improve quality is to use gamification in software development activities. Purpose: This paper presents a framework and a set of strategies called GSA to gamify software development activities. Methods: Using action research as a methodology, we conduct three action research cycles. This paper presents the third action research cycle in which gamification was applied to reduce the number of faults in requirements and improve the quality of the projects. Results: The experimental study showed that the GSA framework introduced gamification into the company to reduce the number of requirements faults. However, the results were inconclusive due to the projects being in their first sprints, and possibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusion: Despite the inconclusive results, the authors believe that the GSA framework is suitable for replication in other companies and software quality improvement contexts. They also present insights and lessons learned throughout the experimental studies on applying gamification in the software development process.
... This digital enhancement affects various stages of organizations, and it needs to adapt to advancements as new methods of working. Human resource (HR) and people management in organizations demand this technology adoption in various modes which has influenced HR operations (Medeiros et al., 2015). In recent years, several methods have been created to encourage and help the workforce accomplish desired behaviors. ...
Background: Research suggests that gamification can increase work engagement by providing employees with a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and by creating a fun and engaging work environment. Gamification is designed to increase consumer and employee engagement and see that they holistically collaborate to achieve a shared vision. The concept of gamification is as old as learning itself, just that the use of the terminology “Gamification” is of a recent origin.
Methods: This article focuses on the impact of gamification in various organizations and simultaneously sees its relationship with job engagement and productivity. A primary investigation was done to determine the nexus between the various variables and data collection from 400 respondents working in various fraternities of the economy from both public and private domains from countries in the Gulf region. The structural equation model and SPSS has been inferred to analyse the results.
Results: The study results show that variable such as perceived adoption and usefulness in the gamified system is significantly associated with job engagement. Similarly, employee’s recognition and perceived motivation have a positive impact on productivity. The study identified job engagement mediating factor to enhance organisational productivity in a gamified system.
Conclusion: The effectiveness of gamification in enhancing work engagement may depend on factors such as the design of the gamification system, the preferences and motivations of individual employees, and the organizational culture and goals. The findings have significant implications for insight into how employees in the service sector are aware of the gamified working environment and react to the system through work engagement and productivity.
... This digital enhancement affects various stages of organizations, and it needs to adapt to advancements as new methods of working. Human resource (HR) and people management in organizations demand this technology adoption in various modes which has influenced HR operations (Medeiros et al., 2015). In recent years, several methods have been created to encourage and help the workforce accomplish desired behaviors. ...
Background: Research suggests that gamification can increase work engagement by providing employees with a sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and by creating a fun and engaging work environment. Gamification is designed to increase consumer and employee engagement and see that they holistically collaborate to achieve a shared vision. The concept of gamification is as old as learning itself, just that the use of the terminology “Gamification” is of a recent origin.
Methods: This article focuses on the impact of gamification in various organizations and simultaneously sees its relationship with job engagement and productivity. A primary investigation was done to determine the nexus between the various variables and data collection from 400 respondents working in various fraternities of the economy from both public and private domains from countries in the Gulf region. The structural equation model and SPSS has been inferred to analyse the results.
Results: The study results show that variable such as perceived adoption and usefulness in the gamified system is significantly associated with job engagement. Similarly, employee’s recognition and perceived motivation have a positive impact on productivity. The study identified job engagement mediating factor to enhance organisational productivity in a gamified system.
Conclusion: The effectiveness of gamification in enhancing work engagement may depend on factors such as the design of the gamification system, the preferences and motivations of individual employees, and the organizational culture and goals. The findings have significant implications for insight into how employees in the service sector are aware of the gamified working environment and react to the system through work engagement and productivity.
... Hence, the second considered evaluation perspective is the Area-specific effects of gamification. As each area of such applications may have its own evaluation dimensions, which are non-applicable to other areas, in this perspective, we chose but one dimension for each area that we know as a frequent target of gamification: Learning [38][39][40], Work Performance [41][42][43], Sales Revenue [44,45], Social Relations [46,47], and Stress Reduction [48,49]. ...
As gamification spreads to new areas, new applications are being developed and the interest in evaluating gamified systems continues to grow. To date, however, no one has comprehensively approached this topic: multiple evaluation dimensions and measures have been proposed and applied without any effort to organize them into a full gamut of tools for the multi-dimensional evaluation of gamified systems. This paper addresses this gap by proposing GATUGU, a set of six perspectives of evaluation of gamified systems: General effects of gamification, Area-specific effects of gamification, Technical quality of gamified systems, Use of gamified systems, Gamefulness of gamified systems, and User experience of gamified systems. For each perspective, GATUGU indicates the relevant dimensions of evaluation, and, for each dimension, one measure is suggested. GATUGU does not introduce any new measurement tools but merely recommends one of the available tools for each dimension, considering their popularity and ease of use. GATUGU can guide researchers in selecting gamification system evaluation perspectives and dimensions and in finding adequate measurement tools. Thanks to conforming to GATUGU, the published gamification system evaluation results will become easier to compare and to perform various kinds of meta-analyses on them.
... As mentioned previously, SBT incorporates key elements of active learning, as simulations provide realistic and dynamic environments which can help students and practitioners improve teamwork and decision-making (Jeong & Bozkurt, 2014). Various approaches and objects have been used by both researchers and practitioners to develop games and simulations to teach agile (McAvoy & Sammon, 2005) and, more specifically, Scrum, such as card games (Fernandes & Sousa, 2010), software simulations (Cubric, 2013;Gkritsi, 2011;Martin, 2000;Von Wangenheim et al., 2013), balls (May, York, & Lending, 2016), role playing (Medeiros, Neto, Passos, & De Souza Araújo, 2015), and LEGO ® bricks (City, 2009;Krivitsky, 2017;Paasivaara et al., 2014). Of these games and simulations, those using LEGO ® bricks seem the most interesting because of the LEGO ® brick materiality (Taylor & Statler, 2014) and its underlying affordances (Faraj & Azad, 2012). ...
The LEGO®-Scrum simulation-based training (SBT) described here shows how LEGO® bricks can help professionals learn first-hand about Scrum methodology, an Agile approach to software development projects. The chapter's objectives are 1) to present the modalities of the LEGO®-Scrum SBT, 2) to demonstrate how LEGO® bricks can help professionals learn, first-hand, about Scrum, and 3) to illustrate how this learning can be relevant and impactful for participants. Based on observations, interviews, and a data collection by questionnaire carried out with 198 participants, the proposed SBT appears to provide a significant, relevant, and valuable learning experience. In addition, four experienced Scrum masters and IT project managers, who played key roles in the SBT, argued that the LEGO®-Scrum SBT provides a realistic representation of real-world Scrum projects; that it is dynamic, complex, challenging, and motivating; and that participants' learning is evocative and relevant, since they learn by doing.
... Initially gamification was only used for marketing [31], but in the last years gamification is being applied to the process improvement in diverse business areas, such as, software engineering [19,32,33,34,35,36] and ITSM. We have found few published works in the context of the ITSM, and the most of them apply gamification for improving the Service Desk performance and engagement [37,38,39]. ...
This paper proposes a conceptual framework for improving Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) processes that is based on as follows: (a) to build a simulation model of the process to improve that enables IT managers to assess the process performance and analyze the effects of changes in the process before their implementation in the organization; and (b) to gamify the model simulation experimentation to increase IT managers motivation and engagement, and drive their behavior through model simulations to meet the established objectives. To illustrate the usefulness of the framework, an application case in the context of the ITIL service capacity management process is summarized.
Context
Gamification is an emerging subject that has been applied in different areas, bringing contributions to different types of activities.
Objective
This paper aims to characterize how gamification has been adopted in non-educational contexts of software engineering (SE) activities.
Methods
We performed a Systematic Mapping of the literature obtained from relevant databases of the area. The searches retrieved 2640 studies (published up to January 2020), of which 548 were duplicates, 82 were selected after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and 21 were included via the backward snowballing technique, thus reaching a total of 103 studies to be analyzed.
Results
Gamification provided benefits to activities like requirements specification, development, testing, project management, and support process. There is evidence of gamified support to some CMMI 2.0 Practice Areas. The most commonly used gamification elements are points and leaderboards. The main benefit achieved is the increased engagement and motivation to perform tasks.
Conclusion
The number of publications and new research initiatives have increased over the years and, from the original authors’ reports, many positive results were achieved in SE activities. Despite this, gamification can still be explored for many SE tasks; for the addressed ones, empirical evidence is very limited.
Context: Gamification is an emerging subject that has been applied in different areas, bringing contributions to different types of activities. Objective: This paper aims to characterize how gamification has been adopted in non-educational contexts of software engineering (SE) activities. Method: We performed a Systematic Mapping of the literature obtained from relevant databases of the area. The searches retrieved 2640 studies (published up to January 2020), of which 548 were duplicates, 82 were selected after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, and 21 were included via the backward snowballing technique, thus reaching a total of 103 studies to be analyzed. Results: Gamification provided benefits to activities like requirements specification, development, testing, project management, and support process. There is evidence of gamified support to some CMMI 2.0 Practice Areas. The most commonly used gamification elements are points and leaderboards. The main benefit achieved is the increased engagement and motivation to perform tasks. Conclusion: The number of publications and new research initiatives have increased over the years and, from the original authors' reports, many positive results were achieved in SE activities. Despite this, gamification can still be explored for many SE tasks; for the addressed ones, empirical evidence is very limited.
Context: Gamification is an emerging subject that has been applied in different areas to bring contributions to different types of activities, including project management activities. Objective: Reporting on an experience of introducing gamification in a real software development company in a peripheral, but relevant for management, software development activity: the timesheet fill. Method: We introduced gamification in software process to motivate team members to fill out their timesheets. The Habitica tool was used to support the gamification. Delays for filling out the timesheets by team members were measured before, within and after the insertion of gamification. Results: We observed a beneficial gamification influence on timesheet fill. Based on historical data and on our measurements, the performance was four times better with gamification when compared with the conventional (i.e. without gamification) approach. Even after gamification removal, the performance remained statistically better than historical records. Conclusion: Gamification improved the attendance on timesheet fulfills and this could help the project manager make the software development more manageable in activities like costs and deadline estimates.
Gamification has increasingly been applied to various life domains and environments, including work and the workplace. Accordingly, research on gamification has grown considerably in the past years. This study presents a systematic review of the theoretical and empirical literature produced in the past 11 years about the application of gamification to the work domain. We analyze the available literature about why gamification is important in work and human resources management, how it can be guided, and which are the examples of gamification in this domain. The systematic review was based on 35 articles, including theoretical papers, empirical (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods) studies, case studies, and other types of papers (presentation of new resources for gamification). Findings are summarized in terms of the sample, country of the study, study type, main results, and gamification and work dimensions associated. The results show that research on the applications of gamification in the workplace is scarce and mostly exploratory. Most studies were conducted using quantitative methods, but with small samples and simple research designs. Although the literature suggests evidence for the usefulness and appropriateness of gamification in the workplace, there are significant limitations in the research, translating a gap between HR practitioners’ concerns and academic developments in this field.
This paper presents a framework for evaluating and designing game design patterns
commonly called as “achievements”. The results are based on empirical studies of a
variety of popular achievement systems. The results, along with the framework for
analyzing and designing achievements, present two definitions of game achievements.
From the perspective of the achievement system, an achievement appears as a challenge
consisting of a signifying element, rewards and completion logics whose fulfilment
conditions are defined through events in other systems (usually games). From the
perspective of a single game, an achievement appears as an optional challenge provided
by a meta-game that is independent of a single game session and yields possible
reward(s).
First Page of the Article
Computer and video games have grown to be a major industry but, until recently, have largely been ignored by academia. The last couple of years, however, have seen the emergence of new academic programs, conferences, and journals dedicated to games studies. For the past three years we have used computer games as projects in our introductory software engineering course. Small teams of students build three games across the semester. In this paper we describe the course and discuss its success.
Anyone can master the fundamentals of game design - no technological expertise is necessary. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses shows that the same basic principles of psychology that work for board games, card games and athletic games also are the keys to making top-quality videogames. Good game design happens when you view your game from many different perspectives, or lenses. While touring through the unusual territory that is game design, this book gives the reader one hundred of these lenses - one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better. These lenses are gathered from fields as diverse as psychology, architecture, music, visual design, film, software engineering, theme park design, mathematics, writing, puzzle design, and anthropology. Anyone who reads this book will be inspired to become a better game designer - and will understand how to do it.
Live action role-playing games share a range of characteristics with massively multi-player online games (MMOGs). Because these games have existed for more than 20 years, players of these games have a substantial amount of experience in handling issues pertinent to MMOGs. Survey and review of live action role-playing games, whose participant count can be in the thousands, reveal that features such as size, theme, game master-to-player ratio, and others interact to form complex systems that require several different groups of control tools to manage. The way that these games are managed offers a variety of venues for further research into how these management techniques can be applied to MMOGs.
The typical software engineering course consists of lectures in which concepts and theories are conveyed, along with a small “toy” software engineering project which attempts to give students the opportunity to put this knowledge into practice. Although both of these components are essential, neither one provides students with adequate practical knowledge regarding the process of software engineering. Namely, lectures allow only passive learning and projects are so constrained by the time and scope requirements of the academic environment that they cannot be large enough to exhibit many of the phenomena occurring in real-world software engineering processes. To address this problem, we have developed Problems and Programmers, an educational card game that simulates the software engineering process and is designed to teach those process issues that are not sufficiently highlighted by lectures and projects. We describe how the game is designed, the mechanics of its game play, and the results of an experiment we conducted involving students playing the game.
Many projects currently used in Software Engineering curricula lack both the "fun factor" needed to engage students, as well as the practical realism of engineering projects that include other computer science disciplines such as Software Engineering, Networks, or Human Computer Interaction. This paper reports on our endeavor to enhance interest and retention in an existing Software Engineering curriculum through the use of computer game-based projects. Specifically, a set of game-centric, project-based modules have been developed that enable students to: (1) actively participate in the different phases of the software lifecycle taking a single project from requirement elicitation to testing and maintenance; (2) expose students to real issues in project and team management over the course of a 2-semester project; and at the same time (3) introduce students to the different aspects of computer game design. Preliminary results suggest the merits of our approach, showing improved class participation and performance.
Although player enjoyment is central to computer games, there is currently no accepted model of player enjoyment in games. There are many heuristics in the literature, based on elements such as the game interface, mechanics, gameplay, and narrative. However, there is a need to integrate these heuristics into a validated model that can be used to design, evaluate, and understand enjoyment in games. We have drawn together the various heuristics into a concise model of enjoyment in games that is structured by flow. Flow, a widely accepted model of enjoyment, includes eight elements that, we found, encompass the various heuristics from the literature. Our new model, GameFlow, consists of eight elements -- concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social interaction. Each element includes a set of criteria for achieving enjoyment in games. An initial investigation and validation of the GameFlow model was carried out by conducting expert reviews of two real-time strategy games, one high-rating and one low-rating, using the GameFlow criteria. The result was a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real-time strategy games and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the GameFlow model as an evaluation tool. The GameFlow criteria were able to successfully distinguish between the high-rated and low-rated games and identify why one succeeded and the other failed. We concluded that the GameFlow model can be used in its current form to review games; further work will provide tools for designing and evaluating enjoyment in games.
A well designed game is providing players genuine feeling of pleasure and happiness or place them in their Flow Zone with a discussion on improving any interactive experience associated with end-user technology. Eight major components of flow are identified in the video games, including- a challenging activity requiring skill, a merging of action and awareness, clear goals, direct, immediate feedback, concentration on the task, a sense of control, a loss of self consciousness, and an altered sense of time. The game should reflect the right balance between challenge and ability to keep players inside the Flow Zone, and the game designers should avoid the counterproductive situations by embedding the player's choice in the core activities of the interactive experience.