Toward Enhancing Software Developers' Persuasion and Engagement in Gamification

Gamification as a method to enhance the engagement of engineers to software development, has recently received attention. Surveillance is regarded as one of the drawbacks of gamification. We assume that some participants do not like this aspect of gamification, and it can weaken the persuasion and engagement of gamification. To enhance persuasion and engagement, we propose a new approach that utilizes costly apology (i.e., apology which is accompanied with some expenses) and the anchoring effect, and to care emotions of such participants. We assume that apology is needed for participants who are not in much favor of gamification and that a costly apology is more effective than a simple apology. We used a graphical leaderboard as costly apology. The anchoring effect means that the judgment is affected by the information given before the judgment. We used a simple leaderboard as the anchoring information. We preliminarily evaluated the proposed approach through a case study.