Gamifying software development scrum projects

Abstract

Despite the wide adoption of agile methodologies, software development teams still struggle to meet time, budget and scope. These challenges are partially explained by practitioners' lack of motivation to apply agile techniques in practice. Some researchers have already proposed to tackle this problem with gamification, i.e. the use of game elements and game-design in non-game contexts. However, very few gamification proposals were evaluated with Scrum teams in practice. In this paper, we present a software tool based on gamification to make Scrum techniques more fun and engaging for practitioners. As a result, practitioners should increase their motivation to apply Scrum techniques in practice, which in turn might result in more and better software. This paper describes the first iteration of a larger research effort that follows the Design Science Research methodology. In this first research iteration, a prototype was developed, and a project team is currently using the prototype to evaluate the real impact of gamification on Scrum adoption in a real-world organization.