Nowadays, software development is done by teams where there are several factors involved in their performance. One of the most important factors is the collaborative work, fundamental skill that every professional should have, especially in the area of software engineering. Based on the above mentioned, the adequate integration of a teamwork influences its performance. Therefore, the skills, knowledge and interactive styles for each member it should be complemented, in order to get a high effective teams. In this context, one of the techniques currently being used for achieving activities related to collaborative work is the gamification, which aims to guide the improvement of the collaborative work. This study presents a comparison among the different gamification elements that can be applied to create a teamwork, reducing its integration time, and therefore, improve its performance.

Gamification in software engineering teamworks: A systematic literature review

Software engineering is inherently a human-centric and collaborative process and this reflects in its teaching programs, as most of the courses comprise projects and team efforts. In order to fairly evaluate students, there is the problem of quantifying the amount of work contributed to the team development project by each of its members. Most commonly, in order to estimates student contributions, instructors use arbitrary and subjective judgment derived from observations and evaluations. The currently used process is not a complete picture and is time consuming since it requires numerous observations and extensive paperwork’s review. Emerging decentralized systems (such as git) and their widespread applications in all realms of development which capitalize on team-aware metrics, are worthwhile and can provide a solution to the problem. In this work we support a solution that utilizes git-driven technology, and its related features, to measure a team member’s contributions objectively, based not only upon the completion of the project, but also at any time during progression development. Such performance assessment could generate more productive team-based learning with higher-quality graduates for better meeting software industry’s expectations.

Measuring Team Members’ Contributions in Software Engineering Projects using Git-driven Technology

A Software Engineering project depends significantly on team performance, as does any activity that involves human interaction. In the last years, the traditional perspective on software development is changing and agile methods have received considerable attention. Among other attributes, the ageists claim that fostering creativity is one of the keys to response to common problems and challenges of software development today. The development of new software products requires the generation of novel and useful ideas. It is a conceptual framework introduced in the Agile Manifesto in 2001. This paper is written in support of agile practices in terms of significance of teamwork for the success of software projects. Survey is used as a research method to know the significance of teamwork.

Significance of the teamwork in agile software engineering

One of the fundamental skill that every professional should have, especially in the area of software engineering, is collaborative work, because teams’ members are required to collaborate to develop software. In this environment, one of the techniques currently being used for achieving activities involving collaborative teamwork is gamification. However, there is a lack of techniques to create software development teams through gamification. This paper presents a study of the use of gamification elements in the software engineering environment for collaborative work, in order to identify those elements that can be applied to create highly effective teams for software development.

State of the Use of Gamification Elements in Software Development Teams

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.

https://ietresearch.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1049/iet-sen.2018.5088

Applying gamification elements to build teams for software development

Teamwork skills are important and even essential for software engineering professionals. Although there are rich research results on teamwork skill development and assessment in other engineering disciplines, more research is required on effective approaches in software engineering education as teamwork plays a more fundamental role with some special requirements. This paper presents a novel assessment approach for teamwork performance in software engineering education. The approach has been used in several software engineering courses and the results are positive and promising. A novel feature of the approach is that it encourages and supports student active and collaborative learning by using an approach specially assessing teamwork performance of a team and each team member of the team. Another feature is that it can be tailored to different requirements and software engineering courses. We illustrate the approach by a case that uses the approach in software project management course. Limitations of the approach and further work are also discussed.

Jian Chen

Papers

Assessing Teamwork Performance in Software Engineering Education: A Case in a Software Engineering Undergraduate Course