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Applying Leaderboards for Quality Improvement in Software Development Projects

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Software Engineering for Games in Serious Contexts

Abstract

Software development projects often fail because of insufficient code quality. It is now well documented that the task of testing software, for example, is perceived as uninteresting and rather boring, leading to poor software quality and major challenges to software development companies. One promising approach to increase the motivation for considering software quality is the use of gamification. Initial research works already investigated the effects of gamification on software developers and come to promising. Nevertheless, a lack of results from field experiments exists, which motivates the chapter at hand. By conducting a gamification experiment with five student software projects and by interviewing the project members, the chapter provides insights into the changing programming behavior of information systems students when confronted with a leaderboard. The results reveal a motivational effect as well as a reduction of code smells.

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Correspondence to Mathias Eggert .

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Eggert, M., Zähl, P.M., Wolf, M.R., Haase, M. (2023). Applying Leaderboards for Quality Improvement in Software Development Projects. In: Cooper, K.M.L., Bucchiarone, A. (eds) Software Engineering for Games in Serious Contexts. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33338-5_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33338-5_11

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