Supporting the Individuation, Analysis and Gamification of Software Components for Acceptance Requirements Fulfilment

In the last few years, Gamification has proved effective for motivating users in using software systems. Gamification Engineering has been proposed as a systematic way to gamify systems. Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) techniques have been emerging for supporting the gamification of a system from the initial stages. However, the gamification of a system itself proved not effective, unless requirements engineers design the gamification solution being driven by characterising users, the context, and considering factors and strategies coming from Social Sciences (e.g., Psychology, Sociology, Human Behaviour, Organisational Behaviour). GORE Gamification Engineering techniques have been enhanced for supporting such concepts, referred to as Acceptance Requirements, and the Agon Framework, with its systematic Acceptance Requirements Analysis Based on Gamification, has been proven effective in different EU Projects. However, according to engineers we interviewed in our projects, some GORE gamification activities remain difficult and require further support. In this paper, our contributions are: (i) individuating such activities and providing lessons learned, (ii) considering a crucial activity, i.e. individuation of software components to gamify and how to gamify them, and proposing a solution for this. Our solution is called Supporting the individuation, analysis, and GAMification (SiaGAM) algorithm. To evaluate SiaGAM, we considered the gamification results of 5 EU projects, compared them with the results of applying SiaGAM, and we found that SiaGAM is effective in supporting the engineer in individuating software functions to gamify.