Gamification of a Static Analysis Tool
A brief look into developer motivation
R.A.A. Saboerali (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
AE Zaidman – Mentor (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
Mauricio Aniche – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
Asterios Katsifodimos – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Web Information Systems)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
Software development is more than only implementing the functional code. A developer is also responsible for writing code measuring up to certain standards and conventions. These conventions make sure that the code is of a particular quality that improves readability and eases maintainability. Some of these conventions are checked by automated tools. Automated static analysis tools (ASATs) perform an analysis of the source code and issue warnings. ASATs are available for many programming languages and can be used to find functional or maintainability issues. Even though these tools have been proven to be useful during the code development process, developers do not always utilize them. The overload of warnings in large projects and relatively low importance of these warnings are one of the many reasons why they are ignored. In this study, a gamification tool, Checkpoint, is developed based on the GOAL methodology. The purpose of this tool is to gamify the development process pertaining to ASATs to motivate developers. The developers are motivated using various gamification elements during a pretest-posttest pre-experimental experiment. The study tested the usability of the tool and its effectiveness. The experiment showed that gamification has an impact on developer motivation.