Understanding gamification mechanisms for software development

In this paper we outline the idea to adopt gamification techniques to engage, train, monitor, and motivate all the players involved in the development of complex software artifacts, from the inception to the deployment and maintenance. The paper introduces the concept of gamification and proposes a research approach to understand how its principles may be successfully applied to the process of software development. Applying gamification to software engineering is not as straightforward as it may appear since it has to be casted to the peculiarities of this domain. Existing literature in the area has already recognized the possible use of such technology in the context of software development, however how to design and use gamification in this context is still an open question. This leads to several research challenges which are organized in a fascinating research agenda that is part of the contribution of this paper. Finally, to support the proposed ideas we present a preliminary experiment that shows the effect of gamification on the performance of students involved in a software engineering project.