On the gamification of human centric traceability tasks in software testing and coding
Traceability is the ability to trace the influence of one software artifact on another by linking dependencies. Test to code traceability (relationships between test and system code) plays a vital role in the production, verification, reliability and certification of highly dependable systems. In practical settings, however, traceability tasks are most often observed in the breach by human developers/testers. Prior research works on test to code traceability in software engineering do not provide high traceability output and accuracy as they mainly rely on sought after approaches to recover links. Gamified Software Engineering (GSE) is a growing field that in particular taps into gamification, the application of game mechanics in non game contexts, to address human related concerns in the field of SE. This paper argues that a new gamified approach is necessary to tackle the human issue of capturing traceability information in a by product manner. Thus, it advocates for the induction of gamification concepts in software traceability. We propose a conceptual framework where the gamification is infusing engagement into human centric traceability tasks to record trace links. An empirical evaluation was performed to assess the performance of the framework compared with a state of the art approach.
2016 IEEE 14th International Conference on Software Engineering Research, Management and Applications (SERA)