Authors:
(1) Oscar Pedreira, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica;
(2) Felix García, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Grupo Alarcos, Escuela Superior de Informatica, Paseo de la Universidad;
(3) Mario Piattini, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Grupo Alarcos, Escuela Superior de Informatica, Paseo de la Universidad;
(4) Alejandro Cortinas, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica;
(5) Ana Cerdeira-Pena, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica. 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 5 Case Study: Application of the Gamification Engine in a Real Company In this section, we present a case study on the application of our proposal in a real company. We have used the case study method, following the template for case studies presented in Ref. [29], and the guidelines proposed in Ref. [30]. We present the background, design, subjects and analysis units, field procedure and data collection, intervention, and an analysis of the results obtained in the case study. 5.1 Description of the organization and its tool suite The case study took place in a small software development company. We will refer to this company as SC throughout the paper. SC focuses mainly on software development, and it currently offers products sold as off-the-shelf packages, as well as custom development services for its customers. The firm currently employees 25 people, 18 of them devoted to software development. Its areas of expertise include software for business management, education, digital contents, electronic commerce, and geographic information systems. SC has certified quality management systems for software development, under ISO 15504/ISO 12207 (SPICE)[31, 32], and information security management, under ISO 27001[33]. It also has experience on software product certification under ISO 25 000[34]. The software engineering environment of SC comprises many tools. SC has, importantly, developed a custom tool for project and requirements management, which we will call SC-Manage. This tool allows project managers to register the project plans and requirement books, to assign tasks to people, and to perform project monitoring. The tool is fed with the effort reports registered by the team members. It therefore has complete information about the project management and the requirements of the project. SC also uses complementary tools, such as Redmine for issue management, TestLink for test plans,JUnit for unit testing, and SVN/GIT for version control. 5.2 Design According to the approach presented by Ref. [35], the design type of the case study is single case — holistic, since we have focused on the single case of SC. The object of the case study is the gamification engine we have presented in Section 4. The main research question of the case study was: is the gamification engine a suitable tool for creating integrated and multi-tool gamified software engineering environments? Table 6 presents the Main Research Questions (MRQ) and Secondary Research Questions (SRQ) of the case study. Our main research question directly addresses the motivation of this work, presented in the introduction of the paper. That is, with this case study we want to validate if our gamification engine would allow us to implement a gamified work environment in real software companies. Therefore, we want to validate that (1) it must be able to integrate and accommodate a wide range of CASE tools, either off-the-shelf or custom developed, without needing to replace them (SRQ 1); (2) the set of behaviors, achievements, and rules provided by the gamification engine must meet the needs of the designer of the gamified environment; and (3) the effort required to integrate the organization’s CASE tools in our framework must be reasonable, that is, it should be by far smaller than that the effort required to replace the organization ’stools or to develop a custom gamification software. As it is described in the rest of this section: (1) the case study was conducted in a real company that works with both well-known off-the-shelf (such as TestLink, Redmine, and JUnit) and custom tools (such as the one used in project management); (2) the implemented gamified environment integrates all these tools and makes use of a wide range of game mechanics similar to those already used in previous works on gamification in SE; and (3) the effort required to implement this environment can be considered really small if compared to the effort required to replace any of the company’s tools or to develop a gamification software from scratch. 5.3 Subjects and analysis units The company SC has already been presented in Section 5.1. Along with other companies, SC participated in a broader research project focused on the application of gamification in software engineering environments. The analysis unit of the case study is the gamification engine, including the integration API and the player’s site. 5.4 Field procedure and data collection The execution of the case study comprised the activities of scope and solution definition, analysis and design of the gamified environment, and development of the gamified platform. The authors of this work took part in the execution of the case study, providing support in the design of the gamified environment, the use of the gamification engine, and the integration of the SE tools. Data related to the design and development of the gamified environment were kept in the form of documents. Data were also obtained from direct interviews with the team members. Finally, data about development efforts also came from the records of the project management tools of SC. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Oscar Pedreira, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica; (2) Felix García, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Grupo Alarcos, Escuela Superior de Informatica, Paseo de la Universidad; (3) Mario Piattini, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Grupo Alarcos, Escuela Superior de Informatica, Paseo de la Universidad; (4) Alejandro Cortinas, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica; (5) Ana Cerdeira-Pena, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica. Authors: Authors: (1) Oscar Pedreira, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica; (2) Felix García, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Grupo Alarcos, Escuela Superior de Informatica, Paseo de la Universidad; (3) Mario Piattini, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Grupo Alarcos, Escuela Superior de Informatica, Paseo de la Universidad; (4) Alejandro Cortinas, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica; (5) Ana Cerdeira-Pena, Universidade da Coruna, Centro de Investigacion CITIC, Laboratorio de Bases de Datos, Facultade de Informatica. Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Related Work 2 Related Work 3 A Software Architecture for the Gamification of SE Environments and 3.1 Software architecture 3 A Software Architecture for the Gamification of SE Environments and 3.1 Software architecture 3.2 Gamification model 3.2 Gamification model 4 Gamification Engine for SE Environments 4 Gamification Engine for SE Environments 4.1 System architecture and design 4.1 System architecture and design 4.2 Integration 4.2 Integration 4.3 Other functionalities 4.3 Other functionalities 4.4 Support of game mechanics and elements and 4.5 Player’s site 4.4 Support of game mechanics and elements and 4.5 Player’s site 4.6 Advanced functionalities 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 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 5.2 Design 5.3 Subjects and analysis units and 5.4 Field procedure and data collection 5.3 Subjects and analysis units and 5.4 Field procedure and data collection 5.5 Intervention 5.5 Intervention 5.6 Analysis of results from the case study 5.6 Analysis of results from the case study 5.7 Validity threats and limitations of the case study 5.7 Validity threats and limitations of the case study Discussion Discussion Conclusion and Future Work, Acknowledgment, and References Conclusion and Future Work, Acknowledgment, and References 5 Case Study: Application of the Gamification Engine in a Real Company In this section, we present a case study on the application of our proposal in a real company. We have used the case study method, following the template for case studies presented in Ref. [29], and the guidelines proposed in Ref. [30]. We present the background, design, subjects and analysis units, field procedure and data collection, intervention, and an analysis of the results obtained in the case study. 5.1 Description of the organization and its tool suite The case study took place in a small software development company. We will refer to this company as SC throughout the paper. SC focuses mainly on software development, and it currently offers products sold as off-the-shelf packages, as well as custom development services for its customers. The firm currently employees 25 people, 18 of them devoted to software development. Its areas of expertise include software for business management, education, digital contents, electronic commerce, and geographic information systems. SC has certified quality management systems for software development, under ISO 15504/ISO 12207 (SPICE)[31, 32], and information security management, under ISO 27001[33]. It also has experience on software product certification under ISO 25 000[34]. The software engineering environment of SC comprises many tools. SC has, importantly, developed a custom tool for project and requirements management, which we will call SC-Manage. This tool allows project managers to register the project plans and requirement books, to assign tasks to people, and to perform project monitoring. The tool is fed with the effort reports registered by the team members. It therefore has complete information about the project management and the requirements of the project. SC also uses complementary tools, such as Redmine for issue management, TestLink for test plans,JUnit for unit testing, and SVN/GIT for version control. 5.2 Design According to the approach presented by Ref. [35], the design type of the case study is single case — holistic, since we have focused on the single case of SC. The object of the case study is the gamification engine we have presented in Section 4. The main research question of the case study was: is the gamification engine a suitable tool for creating integrated and multi-tool gamified software engineering environments? Table 6 presents the Main Research Questions (MRQ) and Secondary Research Questions (SRQ) of the case study. Our main research question directly addresses the motivation of this work, presented in the introduction of the paper. That is, with this case study we want to validate if our gamification engine would allow us to implement a gamified work environment in real software companies. Therefore, we want to validate that (1) it must be able to integrate and accommodate a wide range of CASE tools, either off-the-shelf or custom developed, without needing to replace them (SRQ 1); (2) the set of behaviors, achievements, and rules provided by the gamification engine must meet the needs of the designer of the gamified environment; and (3) the effort required to integrate the organization’s CASE tools in our framework must be reasonable, that is, it should be by far smaller than that the effort required to replace the organization ’stools or to develop a custom gamification software. As it is described in the rest of this section: (1) the case study was conducted in a real company that works with both well-known off-the-shelf (such as TestLink, Redmine, and JUnit) and custom tools (such as the one used in project management); (2) the implemented gamified environment integrates all these tools and makes use of a wide range of game mechanics similar to those already used in previous works on gamification in SE; and (3) the effort required to implement this environment can be considered really small if compared to the effort required to replace any of the company’s tools or to develop a gamification software from scratch. 5.3 Subjects and analysis units The company SC has already been presented in Section 5.1. Along with other companies, SC participated in a broader research project focused on the application of gamification in software engineering environments. The analysis unit of the case study is the gamification engine, including the integration API and the player’s site. 5.4 Field procedure and data collection The execution of the case study comprised the activities of scope and solution definition, analysis and design of the gamified environment, and development of the gamified platform. The authors of this work took part in the execution of the case study, providing support in the design of the gamified environment, the use of the gamification engine, and the integration of the SE tools. Data related to the design and development of the gamified environment were kept in the form of documents. Data were also obtained from direct interviews with the team members. Finally, data about development efforts also came from the records of the project management tools of SC. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license. available on arxiv

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