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SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

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proposed in this work requires the analysis of them in<br />

their own scope and branches to give immediate feedback.<br />

• Fine-grained logs for tasks (developer, time, requirement,<br />

discipline). It is fundamental to record the developer<br />

assigned to each task, the time spent for this<br />

execution, associated requirements, and the nature of the<br />

task (discipline). It must be easy to start, stop, pause<br />

and finish a task. Additionally, it is also important to<br />

create functions to help the developers remember doing<br />

this actions.<br />

• Scrum ceremonies. The Scrum framework is intensively<br />

based on ceremonies. These events have to be registered,<br />

in order to allow the achievements evaluation. It is<br />

necessary to register when, what, why, who, how and<br />

how many time.<br />

B. RUPGY Game-based Proposed Features<br />

RUPGY is a proposal to incorporate RPG-like mechanics to<br />

the everyday use of Scrum. The goal is to make the developer<br />

more aware of his programming character, creating emotional<br />

bonds with this virtual persona, and thus better engaging in<br />

his daily duties. In this section we list the desired features for<br />

RUPGY.<br />

• Character Attributes Engine. In RUPGY, the skills<br />

used to solve challenges are the software engineering<br />

disciplines (requirements, analysis, design, implementation,<br />

testing, project management) and since each task is<br />

related to one of these, the goal is to have the system<br />

compute the amount of experience the developer gains<br />

after finishing his assigned task.<br />

• Class Engine. Given that attributes are not chosen, the<br />

character class must also be automatically inferred based<br />

on the most used disciplines for each developer (programmer,<br />

tester, Scrum master, Product Owner). Similar to<br />

repetition achievements, each class must have a threshold<br />

scale of minimum experience point to reach different<br />

levels.<br />

• Achievements Engine. In our preliminary evaluation, we<br />

mined the achievements directly onto the task database.<br />

For the RUPGY tool, this feature must be automated, in<br />

order to give immediate feedback whenever an achievement<br />

is earned.<br />

• Immediate Feedback. Developers update the state of<br />

their tasks all the time. Sometimes, an update generate<br />

a status change in the related task, or even project. The<br />

system should give immediate feedback, both visual and<br />

audible, of this changes in the character attributes, level<br />

and achievements.<br />

• Character Profile Screen. The aforementioned character<br />

data must be available to the developer in a character<br />

profile screen, with historical information in graphical<br />

form.<br />

VII. CONCLUSION<br />

The Software Engineering has over 40 years of existence.<br />

There are advances in many directions but we are still<br />

researching and creating tools to solve the same problems<br />

registered 40 years ago, like projects running over-budget,<br />

projects running over-time and software often did not meet<br />

requirements.<br />

As mentioned by Brooks [1], there is no silver bullet. But<br />

it is necessary to change this activity in something that can<br />

engage developers more effectively. In this paper we showed<br />

that game mechanics can be applied to Scrum framework. This<br />

approach has the main goal of turning software development<br />

with Scrum in a more amusing task, like a game. In order<br />

to allow this we presented several achievements that can<br />

be incorporated to a Scrum, together with the mapping of<br />

challenge-graph from games to Scrum framework.<br />

We also presented a preliminary evaluation from a real<br />

software house. Some of the proposed achievements were<br />

evaluated against historical data. The results from this analysis<br />

showed that achievements can be an interesting metric to<br />

measure performance in this context, also helping to stimulate<br />

competition among developers. The feedback obtained from<br />

the team was encouraging (from informal inteviews), as everybody<br />

was impressed with the results and enthusiastic about<br />

the idea of incorporate even more mechanics into their activity.<br />

The next step in this research is the development of a<br />

Scrum-based project management tool incorporating all the<br />

suggestions made here. After this will be possible to run a<br />

long term experiment with even more development teams.<br />

REFERENCES<br />

[1] F. P. Brooks, Jr., “No silver bullet essence and accidents of software<br />

engineering,” Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 10–19, Apr. 1987. [Online].<br />

Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MC.1987.1663532<br />

[2] M. Fowler and J. Highsmith, “The Agile Manifesto,” In Software Development,<br />

Issue on Agile Methodologies, http://www.sdmagazine.com,<br />

last accessed on March 8th, 2006, Aug. 2001.<br />

[3] “State of Agile Development,”<br />

http://www.versionone.com/state of agile development survey/10/default.asp<br />

[last accessed: 2011-04-04], VersionOne, 2010. [Online]. Available:<br />

http://www.versionone.com/state of agile development survey/10/default.asp<br />

[4] K. Schwaber, Agile Project Management With Scrum. Redmond, WA,<br />

USA: Microsoft Press, 2004.<br />

[5] D. Takahashi, “Gamification gets its own conference,”<br />

http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/30/gamification-gets-its-ownconference/,<br />

September 2010.<br />

[6] A. Baker, E. O. Navarro, and A. V. D. Hoek, “Problems and programmers:<br />

An educational software engineering card game,” in In ICSE<br />

03: <strong>Proceedings</strong> of the 25th International Conference on Software<br />

Engineering. IEEE Computer Society, 2003, pp. 614–619.<br />

[7] A. Baker, E. O. Navarro, and A. van der Hoek, “An experimental<br />

card game for teaching software engineering processes,” Journal<br />

of <strong>Systems</strong> and Software, vol. 75, no. 1-2, pp. 3 – 16, 2005,<br />

software Engineering Education and Training. [Online]. Available:<br />

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121204000378<br />

[8] E. Passos, D. Medeiros, P. S. Neto, and E. Clua, “Turning real-world<br />

software development into a game,” in In SBGAMEs 2011: <strong>Proceedings</strong><br />

of the X Simpósio Brasileiro de Games e Entretenimento DIgital,<br />

Salvador, BA, Brazil, November 2011.<br />

[9] D. Cook, “What are game mechanics?”<br />

http://www.lostgarden.com/2006/10/what-are-game-mechanics.html,<br />

October 2006.<br />

[10] R. Koster and W. Wright, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Paraglyph<br />

Press, 2004.<br />

[11] D. Cook, “What activities can be turned into games?”<br />

http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/06/what-actitivies-that-can-be-turnedinto.html<br />

, June 2008.<br />

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