Gamification in software engineering – A systematic mapping

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Abstract

Context

Gamification seeks for improvement of the user’s engagement, motivation, and performance when carrying out a certain task, by means of incorporating game mechanics and elements, thus making that task more attractive. Much research work has studied the application of gamification in software engineering for increasing the engagement and results of developers.

Objective

The objective of this paper is to carry out a systematic mapping of the field of gamification in software engineering in an attempt to characterize the state of the art of this field identifying gaps and opportunities for further research.

Method

We carried out a systematic mapping with a view to finding the primary studies in the existing literature, which were later classified and analyzed according to four criteria: the software process area addressed, the gamification elements used, the type of research method followed, and the type of forum in which they were published. A subjective evaluation of the studies was also carried out to evaluate them in terms of methodology, empirical evidence, integration with the organization, and replicability.

Results

As a result of the systematic mapping we found 29 primary studies, published between January 2011 and June 2014. Most of them focus on software development, and to a lesser extent, requirements, project management, and other support areas. In the main, they consider very simple gamification mechanics such as points and badges, and few provide empirical evidence of the impact of gamification.

Conclusions

Existing research in the field is quite preliminary, and more research effort analyzing the impact of gamification in SE would be needed. Future research work should look at other game mechanics in addition to the basic ones and should tackle software process areas that have not been fully studied, such as requirements, project management, maintenance, or testing. Most studies share a lack of methodological support that would make their proposals replicable in other settings. The integration of gamification with an organization’s existing tools is also an important challenge that needs to be taken up in this field.

Introduction

The field of gamification has experienced significant growth and popularity in the last few years [1], [2], [3], [4]. Although many definitions can be found in the literature, gamification has been defined in [1] as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts”. Gamification uses the philosophy, elements, and mechanics of game design in non-game environments to induce certain behavior in people, as well as to improve their motivation and engagement in a particular task. That is to say, gamification takes those features that make real games fun and attractive (and even addictive), and uses them to improve the player experience in a non-game environment, such as the workplace, the school, a software application, or customer-oriented web site.

Gamification has been applied in many different domains in the last years. One of those domains is education and training [5], where game elements are used to increase the motivation, engagement and performance of the students. Gamification has also been a central part of the design of many mobile applications for smartphones and tablets, in the quest to achieve stronger user engagement and diffusion of the applications. Corporate websites oriented toward customers have also been the object of gamification as they seek to improve the customer experience on the website [6]. Gamification has also been applied in corporate environments in an attempt to improve the results of employees in the development of their daily tasks and work [7].

This paper focuses on the potential benefits gamification can bring to the Software Engineering (SE) field; its application here deserves special attention, given the human-intensive nature of software processes. This turns gamification into a promising field which can help to improve the daily engagement and motivation of software engineers in their tasks. As a matter of fact, some existing commercial tools which support SE processes are starting to incorporate basic gamification mechanisms; see, for instance, JIRA Hero [8], RedCritter [9], PropsToYou [10], ScrumKnowsy [11], MasterBranch [12] or Visual Studio Achievements [13]. In the SE field, therefore, researchers and practitioners are not unaware of the potential benefits of gamification in the workplace. A number of proposals have been published in recent years, some of them focused on teaching and training, others on real SE contexts.

Bearing in mind the aforementioned ideas, the focus of this work is to analyze the application of gamification in Software Engineering (SE); a systematic mapping has been carried out to that end. The aim is to provide a more structured view of the state of the art in the field and to identify existing gaps and weaknesses. The scope of this systematic mapping is the software development context; it does not include those pieces of work focusing on teaching or training. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the related work. Section 3 describes how systematic mapping was planned. In Section 4 we present the results we obtained during the study, providing answers for the stated research questions. The discussion of the results obtained in the study is set out in Section 5 and finally, Section 6 summarizes the conclusions of the paper and outlines challenges that may lead to future research.

Section snippets

Related work

To the best of our knowledge, in the relevant literature there are no systematic literature reviews (SLR) or systematic mapping studies which tackle the application of gamification in SE. It is true, however, that we can find some work whose aim is to provide the state of art in the field of gamification. In this line, Hamari et al. [14] analyze the empirical studies on gamification by means of a literature review of peer-reviewed papers, the aim of whose main research question is to evaluate

Planning of the systematic mapping

The purpose of this study is to determine and characterize the state of the art of gamification in software engineering, analyzing the existing proposals and research work and thus identifying potential gaps and opportunities for future research. The main research question guiding this study is therefore:

What is the state of the art of Gamification applied to Software Engineering?

To carry out this systematic mapping, we followed the recommendations in [19], [20]. In this section we present the

Results of the search

The search process was carried out by following the criteria and strategies described in the previous section. Fig. 1 shows a summary of the number of papers obtained in each step of the search process. As the results show, the number of primary studies obtained may appear to be quite small – there are just 16. However, as will be shown in greater detail in this section, all these papers were published between the years 2011 and 2013. The full list of primary studies gathered is listed in

Discussion

In this section we provide a discussion of the results obtained from the classification and analysis of the studies, along with an identification of gaps and opportunities for future research.

As a result of this analysis, the first point to highlight as a result of this study is that the application of gamification in Software Engineering is still in a very initial stage. As can be observed in the results shown in the previous section, most of the studies selected have been published in

Conclusions and future work

In this paper a mapping study has been conducted to characterize the state of art as regards the application of gamification in SE. The focus of this systematic mapping was gamification applied to SE, thus leaving serious games out of the scope of the study. After carrying out the search for primary studies, we classified them according to four facets, namely the process area(s) they considered, the type of gamification elements and mechanics they used in their proposals, the kind of research,

Acknowledgements

This work has been funded by the following projects: GOAL (CDTI EXP 00064563/ITC-20133062), HYPERGRAPH (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, ref. TIN2009-14560-C03-02 (PGE and FEDER)), and Grupo de Referencia Competitiva (Xunta de Galicia, ref. GRC2013/053 (FEDER)) for Oscar Pedreira and Nieves Brisaboa, and GEODAS-BC project (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional FEDER, TIN2012-37493-C03-01) for Félix García and Mario Piattini.

References (29)

  • Atlassian, JIRA Hero....
  • RedCritter, RedCritter Tracker....
  • PropsToYou, “Props To You”,...
  • ScrumKnowsy, “ScrumKnowsy”,...
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