In this section, we present a case study on the application of our proposal in a real company. We have used the case study method, following the template for case studies presented in Ref. [29], and the guidelines proposed in Ref. [30]. We present the background, design, subjects and analysis units, field procedure and data collection, intervention, and an analysis of the results obtained in the case study.

5.1 Description of the organization and its tool suite

The case study took place in a small software development company. We will refer to this company as SC throughout the paper. SC focuses mainly on software development, and it currently offers products sold as off-the-shelf packages, as well as custom development services for its customers. The firm currently employees 25 people, 18 of them devoted to software development. Its areas of expertise include software for business management, education, digital contents, electronic commerce, and geographic information systems.

\ SC has certified quality management systems for software development, under ISO 15504/ISO 12207 (SPICE)[31, 32], and information security management, under ISO 27001[33]. It also has experience on software product certification under ISO 25 000[34].

\ The software engineering environment of SC comprises many tools. SC has, importantly, developed a custom tool for project and requirements management, which we will call SC-Manage. This tool allows project managers to register the project plans and requirement books, to assign tasks to people, and to perform project monitoring. The tool is fed with the effort reports registered by the team members. It therefore has complete information about the project management and the requirements of the project. SC also uses complementary tools, such as Redmine for issue management, TestLink for test plans,JUnit for unit testing, and SVN/GIT for version control.

5.2 Design

According to the approach presented by Ref. [35], the design type of the case study is single case — holistic, since we have focused on the single case of SC. The object of the case study is the gamification engine we have presented in Section 4. The main research question of the case study was: is the gamification engine a suitable tool for creating integrated and multi-tool gamified software engineering environments? Table 6 presents the Main Research Questions (MRQ) and Secondary Research Questions (SRQ) of the case study. Our main research question directly addresses the motivation of this work, presented in the introduction of the paper. That is, with this case study we want to validate if our gamification engine would allow us to implement a gamified work environment in real software companies. Therefore, we want to validate that (1) it must be able to integrate and accommodate a wide range of CASE tools, either off-the-shelf or custom developed, without needing to replace them (SRQ 1); (2) the set of behaviors, achievements, and rules provided by the gamification engine must meet the needs of the designer of the gamified environment; and (3) the effort required to integrate the organization’s CASE tools in our framework must be reasonable, that is, it should be by far smaller than that the effort required to replace the organization ’stools or to develop a custom gamification software.

\ \ Table 6 Research questions of the case study.

\ \ As it is described in the rest of this section: (1) the case study was conducted in a real company that works with both well-known off-the-shelf (such as TestLink, Redmine, and JUnit) and custom tools (such as the one used in project management); (2) the implemented gamified environment integrates all these tools and makes use of a wide range of game mechanics similar to those already used in previous works on gamification in SE; and (3) the effort required to implement this environment can be considered really small if compared to the effort required to replace any of the company’s tools or to develop a gamification software from scratch.

5.3 Subjects and analysis units

The company SC has already been presented in Section 5.1. Along with other companies, SC participated in a broader research project focused on the application of gamification in software engineering environments. The analysis unit of the case study is the gamification engine, including the integration API and the player’s site.

5.4 Field procedure and data collection

The execution of the case study comprised the activities of scope and solution definition, analysis and design of the gamified environment, and development of the gamified platform. The authors of this work took part in the execution of the case study, providing support in the design of the gamified environment, the use of the gamification engine, and the integration of the SE tools. Data related to the design and development of the gamified environment were kept in the form of documents. Data were also obtained from direct interviews with the team members. Finally, data about development efforts also came from the records of the project management tools of SC.

\ \

:::info This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.

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