A Case Study on Gamifying Software Engineering Workplaces

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2 Related Work

3 A Software Architecture for the Gamification of SE Environments and 3.1 Software architecture

3.2 Gamification model

4 Gamification Engine for SE Environments

4.1 System architecture and design

4.2 Integration

4.3 Other functionalities

4.4 Support of game mechanics and elements and 4.5 Player’s site

4.6 Advanced functionalities

5 Case Study: Application of the Gamification Engine in a Real Company and 5.1 Description of the organization and its tool suite

5.2 Design

5.3 Subjects and analysis units and 5.4 Field procedure and data collection

5.5 Intervention

5.6 Analysis of results from the case study

5.7 Validity threats and limitations of the case study

Discussion

Conclusion and Future Work, Acknowledgment, and References

6 Discussion

The software architecture for gamification we present in this paper provides a valuable tool for incorporating gamification in SE workplaces composed of many tools that support different software process areas. As we explained in the previous section, the goal of the case study was to validate if our proposal is suitable for that purpose, that is, if it is able to support a wide range of tools, if the game elements it provides are able to support the gamification mechanics usually applied in software engineering, and if the gamification of a software organization’s workplace can be done at a reasonable cost.

As we have seen in the presentation of the case study, the company in which we conducted it makes use of well-known off-the-shelf tools, such as Redmine, TestLink, and JUnit, and also custom developed tools. The integration of these tools into the gamification engine was not only possible but easy in all cases. Moreover, SWComp decided to develop a single interface for its employees to see the results of their actions in the gamification environment (a web called the player’s portal), but these results could have also been integrated into work tools. For example, a development IDE, such as Eclipse, could have been integrated with our gamification engine, but that same IDE could also show gamification results live to the developers, since our engine not only gathers data about the tasks being completed, but it also responds with the results of evaluating those tasks and allows any tool to access all the information it manages.

The gamification elements provided by the gamification engine cover most of the general-purpose gamification elements. That is, it allows the company to implement a direct reward system in the form of points and badges. But this reward system is combined with the engine’s social network to implement other gamification mechanics, such as levels and leaderboards. These gamification elements also allow us to incorporate other game mechanics, such as quests in which players can challenge other players, and even themselves. In addition, it serves as a basis for a continuous feedback system, since the player’s portalshows SWComp employees real-time information on how the company is evaluating the performance they obtained in each completed task. In addition, the gamification engine provides advanced gamification mechanics, such as the virtual assistant.

The effort (and therefore the cost) of gamifying a work environment should not be forgotten due to its importance for real organizations. As we have seen in the results of the case study we conducted, the effort was really small, especially if we compare that effort with the effort of developing a custom-gamified tool for just one of the process areas we considered.

Although not initially posed as a researchquestion of the case study, other important result can be extracted from the case study we have presented. The design of behaviors, achievements, and gamification rules provided by the framework makes the gamified work environment of SWComp very flexible. Since all the gamification logic is captured by the gamification rules, any change to the game mechanics would only require a modification of those rules through the designer’s web interface, without needing to touch a line of code either on the CASE tools or in the gamification framework. We think thisis a very valuable characteristic of oursolution.

In addition to the core gamification aspects provided by the framework, the additional analysis functionalities it provides can be very useful. The social network analysis gives us an insight on how the players relate with each other, the weight of their relationships, and the existence of clearly defined communities. The sentiment analysis module allows us to detect problems in the motivation and happiness of the players from the messages they introduce in the system, or simply negative sentiments towards the gamified environment we have designed.