Uma abordagem baseada em gamificação para estimativa de esforço em desenvolvimento ágil de software

Abstract

Agile Software Development (ASD) teams sometimes need to execute processes that they consider repetitive or demotivating, compromising the quality of results. Adding gamification elements to these processes could improve team engagement and results. This paper investigates the most relevant difficulties in the processes through a specialized literature review and a survey with ASD practitioners. The process evaluated as the most difficult, User Story (US) effort estimation, is selected for study and treatment with gamification. A new method is proposed for this process, a mixture of methods available in the literature, to improve effort estimates. Next, elements for the gamification of the proposed method are listed. The validation of the proposed method and the listed elements is done by a panel of ASD experts using a structured Delphi technique in search of consensus. Consensus results indicate that the proposed gamified method appears to facilitate its adoption and improve the resulting effort estimates. The paper contributes to software engineering, ASD in particular, and to efforts to gamify its processes and best practices.