Abstract
The replacement of legacy systems in the public sector is fraught with project delays, budgetary overruns, technological and business process complexities. Moreover, the software implemented to replace legacy systems is developed or configured to largely mimic their features and functionality in order to minimize the disruption to organizational operations that accompanies the introduction of new technology. When the requirements for legacy replacement primarily replicate existing applications and processes, opportunities for business process improvement are bypassed. However, it is difficult for practitioners to transcend the business and systems models prevalent in their organizations for many years. The challenge is to support them to overcome such a difficulty, and be creative and engaged during requirements discussions. Our research aims to evaluate the utility of gamifying the requirements activities during legacy replacement projects for scoping replacement systems efforts in a way that takes advantage of opportunities for innovation while minimizing unnecessary changes to the status quo. The supplementation of the requirements process with game elements is explored in our research through the development of a requirements discussion game (RE-PROVO) and its evaluation by practitioners in two government agencies. Our findings reveal that key elements of RE-PROVO, including competition, anonymity and roleplay, encourage a more critical evaluation of business requirements in legacy replacement projects, but that the success of requirements gamification is contingent on a proper incentivization model which takes organizational culture and values into account.
Highlights
Legacy replacement projects constitute a large proportion of digital government projects [14, 31, 60, 78]
The requirements discussions during legacy replacement projects are driven by two opposing practitioner attitudes: one promoting conservatism and risk aversion, and the other, innovation and transformation [5]. We investigate how these attitudes can be incorporated into gameplay and, more precisely, within a gamification of the inquiry-driven model proposed by Colin Potts et al [68], a well-known inquiry model in requirements engineering, to contribute to tackling the legacy problem in the context of government bureaucracies
To supplement the practitioner evaluations, we evaluated RE-PROVO using the Serious Games Design Assessment (SGDA) framework developed by Mitgutsch and Alvarado [59], which regards serious games as purposebased games where entertainment is not the end goal, and where educational or business objectives need to be ostensibly incorporated in all game elements
Summary
Legacy replacement projects constitute a large proportion of digital government projects [14, 31, 60, 78]. Government agencies often use the existing legacy systems features as requirements for their replacement applications This is because legacy features are perceived to be a stable requirements set validated through business use, they are adopted to minimize the risks associated with business change or for project management convenience or due to legislative or policy constraints. While some of these reasons might be legitimate, others lead to unnecessary replication of legacy features and business processes and to the failure to take advantage of digital innovation. We have defined this phenomenon as the “legacy problem” [6]: due to its circular nature, compounded by government agencies’ bureaucratised decisionmaking processes, it can be seen as exhibiting characteristics of “wickedness” [17, 71]
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