Gamifying Business Process Modeling Education: A Longitudinal Study

Gamification, the practice consisting of adapting game elements and features in non-recreational contexts to increase user motivation and interest, has become increasingly common in recent years in the different fields of Software Engineering such as development, requirements definition, testing, and education. Among the different educational fields to which gamification has been applied, process modeling is currently not much explored: there are few examples of game-like approaches used for teaching process modeling, and such examples have yet to be applied for the duration of an entire course to assess possible benefits. We thus describe the use of BIPMIN, a platform that implements elements regularly used in gamified tools such as levels, avatars, and leaderboards, in an Information Systems course, where students used the tool to perform practical BPMN modeling exercises over the whole duration of the course to get feedback on their modeling strategies. The students’ opinions have been gathered in the form of an end-of-course questionnaire and have been analyzed following the Straussian grounded theory approach to assess the general sentiment regarding usability, appreciation, and possible issues and improvement areas of the tool. The gathered results are encouraging, as they show that the tool has been well received and that its features that help student understanding the reasons behind their errors have been perceived as helpful for learning and improving BPMN modeling

BIPMIN: A Gamified Framework for Process Modeling Education

Business Process Modeling is a skill that is becoming sought after for computer engineers, with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) being one example of the tools used in modeling activities. Students of the Master of Computer Engineering course at Politecnico di Torino learn about BPMN in dedicated courses but often underperform on BPMN-related exercises due to difficulties understanding how to model processes. In recent years, there has been a surge of studies that employ gamification (using game elements in non-recreative contexts to obtain benefits) as a tool in Computer Engineering education to increase students’ engagement with the learning process. This study aims to use the principles of gamification to design a supplementary learning tool for the teaching of information systems technology. In particular, to improve student understanding and use of BPMN diagrams. This study also analyzes the usability and motivation of the participants in using different game elements in increasing student motivation and performance. As part of the study, a prototype web application was developed, which implemented three different designs, each incorporating different game elements relating to either progress, competition, or rewards. An evaluation was then conducted on the prototype to evaluate the performance of the practitioners in performing BPMN modeling tasks with the gamified tool, the usability of the proposed mechanics and the enjoyment of the individual game mechanics that were implemented. With the usage of the gamified tool, the users of the experimental sample were able to complete BPMN modeling tasks with performances compatible with estimates made through expert judgement (i.e., gamification had no negative effect on performance), and were motivated to check the correctness of their models many times during the task execution. The system was evaluated as highly usable (85.8 System Usability Score); the most enjoyed game elements were rewards, levels, progress bars and aesthetics

Gamified UML Experiment - Reference Solutions

This resource represents the reference solutions used in an experiment where gamification was adopted for conceptual modeling education of students in a Master's degree Information Systems course.The resource contains the textual description of the two exercises used, as well as the reference solutions accepted by the gamified tool.The experiment was conducted in an Italian course, so the reference solution expects the usage of the Italian language.</p

Gamification of Conceptual Modeling Education: An Analysis of Productivity and Students' Perception - Replication package

The following resource contains the replication package for the analysis of the results of the experiment described in the paper Gamification of Conceptual Modeling Education: An Analysis of Productivity and Students' Perception submitted to the journal Software Quality Journal. The resource contains the following files:UMLegend Data.xlsx An Excel file that contains the metrics found in the diagrams produced by the participants of the experiment (the size of their diagrams and the progress score obtained).UMLegend Diagrams.zip A compressed folder that contains all the diagrams produced by the participants that have been analyzed.</p

GERRY: A Gamified Browser Tool for GUI Testing

Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing is a relevant step of the soft- ware development process which is not often performed thoroughly due to its unappealing nature, to the inherent fragility of test cases, and to the fact that test cases – composed of long and complicated sequences of operations – have to be manually written by testers. We propose GERRY , a Capture &amp; Replay GUI testing tool which implements an approach based on Gamification, i.e., the application of gaming elements to non-ludic activities. The purpose of the tool is to increase the engagement of the testers when performing GUI test case definition tasks. The tool makes use of mechanics typical of games such as progress indicators, leaderboards, and unlockable rewards, to increase user interest and involvement. GERRY also generates reports (i.e., traces of all actions and milestones reached during a session), written logs of the performed testing sessions, and scripts compatible with existing GUI testing tools (SikuliX and Selenium) for replay purposes

Gamification of Business Process Modeling Notation education: an experience report

Business Process Modeling (BPM) is a skill considered fundamental for computer engineers, with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) being one of the most commonly used notations for this discipline. BPMN modeling is present in different curricula in specific Master’s Degree courses related to software engineering, but, in practice, students often underperform on BPMN modeling exercises due to difficulties in learning good modeling practices. In recent years, more and more fields of computer science have employed gamification (the usage of game elements in non-recreational contexts to gain benefits in terms of interest, participation, motivation, and enjoyment) with positive results during both development and teaching processes. Thus, we have developed a platform for BPMN modeling that employs gamification mechanics to facilitate learning good modeling practices with mechanisms such as rewarding good modeling solutions and penalizing less correct ones, with a dedicated feedback mechanism that maps correctly modeled elements to the corresponding concept. A preliminary laboratory experiment has been conducted with students of an Information Systems course to evaluate how students receive the mechanics and if there may be benefits in using a gamified environment for teaching process modeling throughout an entire course

BIPMIN: A Gamified Framework for Process Modeling Education

Business Process Modeling is a skill that is becoming sought after for computer engineers, with Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) being one example of the tools used in modeling activities. Students of the Master of Computer Engineering course at Politecnico di Torino learn about BPMN in dedicated courses but often underperform on BPMN-related exercises due to difficulties understanding how to model processes. In recent years, there has been a surge of studies that employ gamification (using game elements in non-recreative contexts to obtain benefits) as a tool in Computer Engineering education to increase students’ engagement with the learning process. This study aims to use the principles of gamification to design a supplementary learning tool for the teaching of information systems technology. In particular, to improve student understanding and use of BPMN diagrams. This study also analyzes the usability and motivation of the participants in using different game elements in increasing student motivation and performance. As part of the study, a prototype web application was developed, which implemented three different designs, each incorporating different game elements relating to either progress, competition, or rewards. An evaluation was then conducted on the prototype to evaluate the performance of the practitioners in performing BPMN modeling tasks with the gamified tool, the usability of the proposed mechanics and the enjoyment of the individual game mechanics that were implemented. With the usage of the gamified tool, the users of the experimental sample were able to complete BPMN modeling tasks with performances compatible with estimates made through expert judgement (i.e., gamification had no negative effect on performance), and were motivated to check the correctness of their models many times during the task execution. The system was evaluated as highly usable (85.8 System Usability Score); the most enjoyed game elements were rewards, levels, progress bars and aesthetics

Guidelines for GUI Testing Maintenance: A Linter for Test Smell Detection

Context: GUI Test suites suffer from high fragility, in fact modifications or redesigns of the user interface are commonly frequent and often invalidate the tests. This leads, for both DOM- and visual-based techniques, to frequent need for careful maintenance of test suites, which can be expensive and time-consuming. Objective: The goal of this work is to present a set of guidelines to write cleaner and more robust test code, reducing the cost of maintenance and producing more understandable code. Based on the provided recommendations, a static test suite analyzer and code linter has been developed. Method: An ad-hoc grey literature research was conducted on the state of the practice, by performing a semi-systematic literature review. Authors’ experience was coded into a set of recommendations, by applying the grounded theory methodology. Based on these results, we developed a linter in the form of a plugin for Visual Studio Code, implementing 17 of the provided guidelines. The plugin highlights test smells in the Java and Javascript languages. Finally, we conducted a preliminary validation of the tool against test suites from real GitHub projects. Conclusions: The preliminary evaluation, meant to be an attempt of application of the plugin to real test suites, detected three main smells, namely the usage of global variables, the lack of adoption of the Page Object design pattern, and the usage of fragile locator such as the XPath

A Framework for the Gamification of GUI Testing

Software testing is a critical activity in the software development process. Several techniques have been proposed, addressing different levels of granularity from low-level unit testing to higher-level exploratory testing through the software’s graphical user interface (GUI). In modern software development, most test cases are obtained by automated test generation. However, while automation generally achieves high coverage in code-level white-box testing, it does not always generate realistic sequences of interactions with the GUI. By contrast, manual exploratory testing has survived as a costly, error-prone, and tedious yet crucial activity. Gamification is seen as an opportunity to increase user satisfaction and engagement while performing testing activities. It could also enable and encourage crowdsourced testing tasks. The purpose of the study described in this chapter is to provide a framework of gamification mechanics and dynamics that can be applied to the practice of manual exploratory GUI testing. We provide an implementation of the framework as an extension of an existing manual exploratory GUI testing for Web applications, and we provide a preliminary evaluation of the gamified tool in terms of provided efficiency, effectiveness, and user experience. Our results show that the gamified solution makes the testers obtain test suites with higher coverage while reducing slightly the number of bugs signalled while traversing the applications under test. The gamified tool also was considered to provide a positive user experience, and the majority of participants expressed their willingness to use such instruments again in the future. As future work, we foresee the implementation of the framework in a stand-alone tool and in-depth empirical experiment to evaluate quantitatively the benefits and drawbacks provided by such mechanics in real testing scenarios