Gamification in Software Engineering: A literature Review

Given the impact of people motivation on software engineering, it is no surprise to see that gamification techniques have been studied and applied to the field. A relevant number of studies have been reported on the subject, and different understandings of the technique are around. However, it is not clear what gamification brings to industrial software development settings. This paper intends to map the state of the art on the use and understanding of gamification in industrial software development. We aim to review the definitions of gamification adopted in software engineering studies, identify the elements of games that are used to motivate software engineers, and map the specific areas of software engineering that have been addressed so far. For that end, we conducted a mixed method literature review, covering 130 studies. From such review, we found that (1) researchers in the field tend towards a strict view of gamification, (2) the practical results of gamification are unclear and polemic, and (3) this research area has still much to improve.