Gamification and Functional Prototyping to Support Motivation Towards Software Process Improvement

The topic of commitment in software process improvement (SPI) has been a recurrent topic of research that has not received enough attention in the recent years. In many situations, the lack of commitment in SPI initiatives is appointed as the major cause leading to failure. In this paper, we propose the use of simulation-based process functional prototyping as a tool to design and test SPI initiatives in a risk-free environment together with gamification, as a means to boost motivation and commitment. The paper shows the conceptualization of the proposal and the design of the gamification strategy, describes the tools built at the technical implementation of the strategy and summarizes the main results of a pilot study conducted to initially evaluate the proposal.