An Exploration of the Use of Gamification in Agile Software Development

Although Project Management has existed for many millennia, software project management is relatively new. As a discipline, software project management is considered difficult. The reasons for this include that software development is non-deterministic; opaque and delivered under ever-increasing time pressure in a volatile environment. Evolving from Incremental and Iterative Development (IID), Agile methodologies have attempted to address these issues by focusing on frequent delivery; working closely with the customer; being responsive to change and preferring working software to extensive documentation. This focus on delivery rather than documentation has sometimes been misrepresented as no documentation, which has led to a shortfall in project metrics. Gamification has its roots in motivation. The aim of gamification is to persuade users to behave in a manner set out by the designer of the gamification. This is achieved by adding game mechanics or elements from games into non-game applications. This dissertation examines the use of gamification in Agile projects and includes an empirical experiment that examines the use of gamification on Agile project tracking. Project tracking is an element of software engineering that acts as a de-motivator for software engineers. Software Engineers are highly motivated by independence and growth, while project tracking is seen as boring work. The dissertation experiment identifies a methodology for applying gamification experiments and then implements an experiment. The result was an overall improvement in project tracking. The experiment needs to be expanded to be run over a longer period of time and a more varied group of development teams

Gamification in higher education and stem : a systematic review of literature

In recent years, gamification, the use of game elements in non-game contexts, has drawn the attention of educators due to the possibility of making learning more motivating and engaging; this led to an increase of research in the field. Despite the availability of literature reviews about gamification and its effects, no work to this date has focused exclusively on Higher Education (HE). Next, worldwide there is an increasing demand for skilled Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) professionals that meet the challenges related to scientific and technological innovations of the 21st Century. This lead to the need of strengthening STEM Higher Education. This brings us to the purpose of this work: presenting a systematic literature review of empirical studies about gamification STEM related Higher Education. This review study started from a systematic mapping design of 'Web of Science' articles, with following inclusion criteria: empirical gamification studies set up in HE, published between 2000 and 2016; focusing on undergraduate or graduate students; in the STEM knowledge field, and set up in authentic settings. An initial search resulted in 562 potentially relevant articles. After applying all selection criteria, only 18 studies could be retained. 12 additional articles were included by analyzing references from earlier literature reviews, resulting in 30 studies to be included. Analysis results show how a combination of game elements (e.g. leaderboards, badges, points and other combinations) positively affects students' performance, attendance, goal orientation and attitude towards mostly computer science related subjects. The analysis results also point at a lack of studies in certain STEM areas, a lack of studies that identify the particular game element associated with the positive differential impact on student performance; a lack of validated psychometric measurements, and lack of focus on student variables that could/should be taken into account as mediating/moderating variables clarifying the impact of gamification in the HE focus on STEM learning and teaching

Developing an activity-based user interface for remote experimentation for science education in schools

As technology continues to expand at an exponential rate our lives become infinitely more connected and complex, this creates an opportunity however, in the form of more highly skilled professional roles on offer. To help address the projected demand in future roles, as well as Australia’s deteriorating graduation rate this project will aim to design, develop and evaluate a web-based user interface. The outcomes of this project were two fold; technical work to create the interface and integrate it with pre-existing remote experiments, as well as research based outcomes concerning the various teaching methods, motivations and requirements. As such the evaluation methods for both outcomes will derive a degree of completeness with validation occurring through both the functionality and feel but also in regards to any research results generated. The interface, known as the User Centered Activity System (UCAS) is beginning user testing currently and consists of the base pages required to access and complete activities. It is hoped that this interface will impart the requisite knowledge required for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) learning, whilst engaging and encouraging users aided by the addition of game-like elements

Using Gamification for Adopting Scrum

Despite the wide adoption of agile methodologies, software development teams still struggle to meet time, budget and scope, partially due to practitioners’ lack of motivation to apply agile techniques in practice. In this paper, we present a software tool based on gamification to make Scrum techniques more fun and engaging for practitioners. This paper presents results of the first iteration of a larger research effort that follows the Design Science Research methodology, where a prototype was developed as a Jira Software app and evaluated with a Scrum team in practice. Results suggest that the team’s Scrum practices slightly improved after using the app. Quantitative analysis and a set of interviews with the team members allowed to understand that the proposal should be more challenging and the score system more customized. Hereafter the app will be improved based on received feedback

Improving WebIDE through Delightful Design and Gamification

WebIDE is a web-based online learning environment. WebIDE has been used successfully to teach CS0 and CS1 students Java and C concepts and software engineering best practices, specically Test Driven Development. Previous Web- IDE development has concentrated on developing functionality. The main goal of this eort is to improve two non-functional aspects of WebIDE. The rst is to design a more delightful user interface. The second is to add a scoring mecha- nism that encourages students to develop best practices. The scoring mechanism rewards students who answer the question correctly on the rst attempt, dis- couraging them from spamming the answer button. Our objective is to motivate the students to think before answering. The innovations are evaluated through a semi-controlled experiment that was conducted during the Fall quarter of 2012 at Cal Poly

Gamethinking: a roadmap to a Design Thinking-based model for Game Development education

O mindset, comportamento e postura de alunos de licenciatura em desenvolvimento de videojogos integrados em sistemas de aprendizagem baseados em projecto têm-se revelado uma barreira à criatividade das suas propostas de projects, mais especificamente no que diz respeito a processos criativos. Ao passo que a utilização sistemática do Design Thinking (DT) ao longo do currículo escolar certamente melhoraria a situação. Uma abordagem diferente é claramente necessária, muito provavelmente uma que combine DT com gamificação, e que faça uma utilização apropriada da aprendizagem baseada em projeto (PBL) com os métodos ágeis. De forma a refinar e clarificar a nossa contribuição na conjunção destas perspetivas, conduzimos uma revisão da literatura inicial que validou os nossos objetivos. Complementarmente, também definimos um roadmap para transformar tais intenções em acções práticas para a criação de um novo modelo de desenvolvimento de videojogos baseado nos princípios do DT. Toda a definição é baseada na metodologia IDEAS(R)EVOLUTION, a qual provê uma estrutura para toda a investigação no longo prazo. Palavras-chave: design Thinking; aprendizagem baseada em projeto; agile; gamificaçã

Loki : the semantic wiki for collaborative knowledge engineering

We present Loki, a semantic wiki designed to support the collaborative knowledge engineering process with the use of software engineering methods. Designed as a set of DokuWiki plug-ins, it provides a variety of knowledge representation methods, including semantic annotations, Prolog clauses, and business processes and rules oriented to specific tasks. Knowledge stored in Loki can be retrieved via SPARQL queries, in-line Semantic MediaWiki-like queries, or Prolog goals. Loki includes a number of useful features for a group of experts and knowledge engineers developing the wiki, such as knowledge visualization, ontology storage, or code hint and completion mechanism. Reasoning unit tests are also introduced to validate knowledge quality. The paper is complemented by the formulation of the collaborative knowledge engineering process and the description of experiments performed during Loki development to evaluate its functionality. Loki is available as free software at https://loki.re

Software Development with Scrum: A Bibliometric Analysis and Profile

Introduction of the Scrum approach into software engineering has changed the way software is being developed. The Scrum approach emphasizes the active end-user involvement, embracing of change, and /iterative delivery of products. Our study showed that Scrum has different variants or is used in combination with different methods. Some tools not normally used in the conventional software approaches, like gamification, content analysis and grounded theory are also employed. However, Scrum like other software development approach focuses on improvement of software process, software quality, business value, performance, usability and efficiency and at the same time to reduce cost, risk and uncertainty. Contrary to some conventional approaches it also strives to boost soft factors like agility, trust, motivation, responsibility and transparency. The bibliometric synthetic scoping study revealed seven main research themes concerned with the Scrum research

Challenges and opportunities of low-code platforms for software development

The current energy and climate crisis emphasize the energy-efficiency knowledge gap as a pressing problem. This is addressed in the report and the mobile application called EnMo, which was developed as part of this field lab. Topics regarding gamification, big data analytics, and low-code development were investigated. The findings provide the foundation for developing the app and its mission as a solution to the problem. EnMo incentivizes users to reduce their household energy consumption, by collecting user information and providing educational and gamified content. Thus, EnMo enables consumers to change their behavior and reduce their energy-efficiency knowledge gap. This exposition discusses the challenges and opportunity of low-code platforms for software development specifically. While speedy development, low maintenance and cost as well as low transparency and customization were filtered out as advantages of low-code, potential vendor lock-ins, black box issues and the fear of replacing software developers might present pitfalls of the technology