Article In: scopus, orcid

A Gamification Solution for Improving Scrum Adoption

Empirical Software Engineering

Rita Marques; Gonçalo Costa; Pedro Gonçalves — 2020

Key information

Authors:

Rita Marques (Rita Andreia da Conceição Marques); Gonçalo Costa (Gonçalo Maia da Costa); Miguel Mira da Silva (Miguel Mira da Silva); Daniel Gonçalves (Daniel Jorge Viegas Gonçalves); Pedro Gonçalves

Published in

07/01/2020

Abstract

Despite the wide adoption of agile methodologies, software development teams still struggle to meet requirements, partially due to practitioners’ lack of motivation to apply agile techniques in practice. We propose a gamification software tool to make Scrum techniques more fun and engaging for practitioners. This paper presents the results of the first iteration of a larger research effort that follows the Design Science Research methodology, in which a prototype was developed as a Jira Software app and evaluated with a real-world Scrum team. The results suggest that gamification can positively impact practitioners’ motivation by changing the atmosphere within the team, even if it does not contribute to the improvement of Scrum practices adoption. The metrics corresponding to Scrum techniques slightly increased after using the app, but this result probably cannot be attributed to practitioners’ improved motivation. Quantitative analysis and interviews with the team members showed that the gamified experience should be more challenging. We conclude that gamification’s potential can be better achieved if more and better studies are conducted based on mixed methods, even if the conditions are not ideal. The app has been improved based on the feedback received, and currently is being evaluated with other Scrum teams.

Publication details

Authors in the community:

Link to the publisher's version

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-020-09816-9

Title of the publication container

Empirical Software Engineering

First page or article number

2583

Last page

2629

Volume

25

Issue

4

DOI

10.1007/s10664-020-09816-9

Fields of Science and Technology (FOS)

computer-and-information-sciences - Computer and information sciences

Keywords

  • Gamification
  • Software development
  • Software process
  • Agile
  • Scrum
  • Motivation

Publication language (ISO code)

eng - English

Rights type:

Only metadata available