Towards gamification in software traceability: Between test and code artifacts

With the ever-increasing dependence of our civil and social infrastructures to the correct functioning of software systems, the need for approaches to engineer reliable and validated software systems grows rapidly. Traceability is the ability to trace the influence of one software artifact on another by linking dependencies. Test-to-code traceability (relationships between test and system code) plays a vital role in the production, verification, reliability and certification of highly software-intensive dependable systems. Prior work on test-to-code traceability in contemporary software engineering environments and tools is not satisfactory and is limited with respect to the need regarding results accuracy, lack of motivation, and high required effort by developers/testers. This paper argues that a new research is necessary to tackle the above weaknesses. Thus, it advocates for the induction of gamification concepts in software traceability, and takes a position that the use of gamificaiton metrics can contribute to software traceability tasks in validating software and critical systems. We propose a research agenda to execute this position by providing a unifying foundation for gamified software traceability that combines self-adaptive, visualization, and predictive features for trace links.