Nowadays computer games are applied beyond entertainment. Gamification, the application of game elements in non-game environments supports behavioural studies in different disciplines including software engineering, the area in which collaborative work has become a fundamental key. The most used gamification elements in software development environments were analysed from two perspectives: (i) team building or reinforcement activities; and (ii) regarding a set of people's interactive styles. Then, interactive styles with software engineering roles were related in order to be able to identify scenarios that conform a model to build highly effective teams. The three analyses together allow identifying proper gamification elements for modelling scenarios to support the creation of highly effective teams in the software development domain.

Software development organisations are interested in adopting new agile methods and techniques. However, they often do not have the time and resources to explore available approaches or to customise them to the current situation at the project or organisational levels. As software companies are usually dealing with significant pressure and have to demonstrate productivity, time for software process improvement (SPI) is very limited. Using serious collaborative games can be helpful for the deployment of certain best practices recommended by agile methods. With the objective of facilitating SPI in organisations, the authors propose a ready-to-use collaborative game toolbox that is oriented for practical use in project team meetings. The set of collaborative games included in the toolbox have been designed for agile teams, regardless of the maturity level, to innovate and improve communication and cohesion, and to bring business value out of agile ceremonies.

Gamification is a research field that is intended to increase motivation, so it is especially indicated in human capital intensive environments such as the software industry. Within Software Engineering, one of the main issues regarding software process improvement (SPI) is personnel motivation in specific SPI initiatives. These issues are stronger in small and medium software development companies where employees have to deal with the pressure of deadlines and occasional work overload. To address the adoption of SPI initiatives, the researchers implemented a defined gamification framework for deployment in SPI efforts in order to increase motivation among software workers and to enhance SPI results. The framework was rolled out in a small Spanish software development organisation, which is conducting internal SPI initiatives. To validate the effectiveness of the implemented framework, a controlled experiment was carried out in which an experimental group adopted SPI improvements using a gamification approach. The implementation results show that the application of the framework does not increase personnel motivation in SPI tasks although it contributes to enhancing the SPI tasks performance. This study discusses the limitations and recommendations to implement appropriately the SPI-gamification framework in the scope of small and medium software development companies.

Gamification is used in several contexts, such as marketing, education, and public health. The authors implement gamification to promote a dynamic environment relative to software process improvement. However, well-established theoretical guidelines to design gamified experiences are lacking. The authors propose a framework to assess gamified environments, identify and adopt gamification principles, as well as design gamified activities. The proposed framework helps users create gamified experiences that satisfy the purposes, goals, principles, and elements defined as fundamental gamification components. Here, the authors apply the proposed framework to a video scrum simulation to assess the adoption of gamification principles. The case study includes identification of gamification principles incorporated in the video scrum and their relationships to the elements of the mechanics, dynamics, and emotions framework. The results show that the game elements defined in the design layer of the proposed framework were realised in the video scrum simulation.

Software development, in many moments, is an exciting and challenging activity, but it can present itself as a boring endeavour in others. At the same time, the introduction of game elements into efforts such as the teaching of Software Engineering shows that real-world activities can assemble game design elements and that it can make them more engaging. In this work, it is proposed the introduction of game design elements in software development, especially in the Scrum process. For this, elements are included to stimulate adherence to the prescriptions of the process, besides stimulating the execution of more activities by the team, positively impacting the productivity of a project. The authors present the idealised mechanics and the results obtained from the accomplishment of a case study in a software development team in a private company. Overall, the gamification applied to software development stimulated developers to perform their daily tasks, although this result did not generate strong evidence of increased productivity.

In recent years, an increasing interest has been observed in the development and use of simulations, serious games (SGs) and gamification strategies to teach software project management (SPM) in a highly practical way. The current SGs for SPM have a quite specific scope, are not able to provide and dynamically change game scenarios during the life of the SG and do not allow teachers to assess students' new skills automatically. These weaknesses led to the development of ProDec, a simulation-based SG that is able to incorporate SPM real-life practice. In this study, the authors discuss the use of SGs in SPM education before they describe ProDecAdmin, the game scenario design tool for ProDec. ProDecAdmin provides teachers with an environment for designing the game scenarios for ProDec. Additionally, it helps teachers establish the assessment criteria to automate the students' assessment during the game plays. These functionalities allow ProDec to offer students any game scenario that teachers design and to assess their performance in them. Hence, the tool ProDecAdmin helps the SG ProDec to overcome the lack of flexibility and automatic assessment identified in the current SGs for SPM. This study also outlines the results of the usability evaluation conducted.

Software engineering is a set of activities that rely not only on the technical tasks but also require abilities focused on social duties such as daily meetings and product introduction presentations. However, engineers may experience elevated levels of anxiety when required to present their work in an unfamiliar environment. More specifically, they may suffer from public speaking anxiety even though they are supposed to be effective in those social tasks as well as in their engineering activities. Fortunately, previous studies suggest that the virtual exposure intervention is an effective strategy to reduce public speaking anxiety. In this study, an interactive three-dimensional virtual environment similar to real classrooms and auditoriums was developed to examine whether this might decrease the anxiety levels of novice software engineers. To compare the traditional and virtual exposure intervention, the sample set was divided equally into two groups including one experimental group and one control group. For 4 weeks, the virtual exposure intervention was conducted in the experimental group, whereas the cognitive behaviour therapy-based psychoeducation was used in the control group. The findings from authors’ study illustrate that the virtual exposure intervention may represent an alternative solution to the traditional interventions for software engineers seeking to overcome public presentation anxiety.

Protecting people from cyber threats imposes great challenges, not only technically, but also socially. To achieve the intended level of awareness, software security principles need to be shown with concrete examples during security education. This study aims to design a serious game integrating software security knowledge and concepts into the processes to make it more engaging to learn while playing. In this paper, we have: (i) designed a serious game to compensate the deficiencies in the literature; (ii) performed empirical evaluations including survey, brainstorming and observation to the proposed game. Results: Our study shows that: (i) Cyber Security-Requirements Awareness Game (CSRAG) has a positive effect on players security learning outcomes, level of engagement and participation; (ii) Game-based learning can be an effective way of teaching security related scenarios.