Examining reward mechanisms for effective usage of application lifecycle management tools

Application lifecycle management (ALM) highlights the rules of the road for the entire software ecosystems’ lifecycle. Successful ALM enables clarity around the entire delivery effort, from defining requirements to deploying the software product. One of the challenges in software engineering today is to orchestrate ALM tools to a set of software projects effectively. In particular, it is challenging for software practitioners to continuously fully engage with the tasks that are assigned to them. The goal of this study is to address such situations using a game theoretic approach by utilizing a reward mechanism, which we intent to test in a medium-sized software development organization. Based on a set of game elements, this study proposes an auction mechanism to address human resource allocation and task optimization issues, and consequently tackle the potential problem of software practitioners’ engagement

An auction-based serious game for bug tracking

Today, one of the challenges in software engineering is utilizing application lifecycle management (ALM) tools effectively in software development. In particular, it is hard for software developers to engage with the work items that are appointed to themselves in these ALM tools. In this study, we have focused on bug tracking in ALM where one of the most important metrics is mean time to resolution that is the average time to fix a reported bug. To improve this metric, we developed a serious game application based on an auction-based reward mechanism. The ultimate aim of this approach is to create an incentive structure for software practitioners to find and resolved bugs that are auctioned where participants are encouraged to solve and test more bugs in less time and improve quality of software development in a competitive environment. We conduct hypothesis tests by performing a Monte Carlo simulation. The preliminary results of this research support the idea that using a gamification approach for an issue tracking system enhances the productivity and decreases mean time to resolution

Updating a web-based card game to teach programming, cybersecurity and software development life cycle concepts

Game-Based Learning (GBL) has been shown to be effective in teaching software engineering practices and principles. This research updates Program Wars, a web-based card game, to improve the support for learning concepts of various programming structures and concepts (i.e. variables, loop, method). Additionally, the game's support for learning cybersecurity practices and concepts was refined. A user study evaluated this new version of Program Wars, and it was found that the latest version performs better in terms of learning various programming components along with cybersecurity concepts than the older version. Finally, a new gaming mode was introduced to the newest version of the game to teach the Software Development Life Cycle and the Iterative Software Development Methodology. A separate user study is also proposed in this research work to evaluate this version of the gameplay

Evaluating GameDevTycoon for teaching software engineering

Academia and industry recognize the effectiveness of teaching Software Engineering through group-based project work supported by lectures discussing software engineering theory. However, while undertaking such project work, only a very small number of students in the team are exposed to team leadership and project management. This is because teams usually struggle with organization and timely task completion, and there is usually no time left to rotate leadership roles. To alleviate this problem, several gaming approaches have been proposed. In this paper, we analyze GameDevTycoon, the most recent addition to such games. We include a gameplay and reflection component in our group-based project course and perform a quantitative analysis of a team management and leadership aspects that the students encountered during their gameplay. We further compare and evaluate GameDevTycoon against five other software engineering-focused games. Our analysis shows the advantages and disadvantages of using GameDevTycoon for teaching project management and highlight further directions towards better inclusion in the curriculum.Claudia Szab