It was a bit of a race: Gamification of version control

The adoption of software engineering practices cannot always be achieved by education or processes. However, social software has the potential for supporting deliberate behavior change. We present preliminary results of an experiment in which we encouraged computer science students to make more frequent commits to version control by using a social software application. We provided a web-based newsfeed of commits that also displayed a leaderboard. While we have yet to analyze the data, interviews we conducted with the participants allow for first qualitative insights.

[1]  Lennart E. Nacke,et al.  From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification" , 2011, MindTrek.

[2]  Christoph Treude,et al.  Awareness 2.0: staying aware of projects, developers and tasks using dashboards and feeds , 2010, 2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering.

[3]  Ben Kirman,et al.  Motivating physical activity at work: using persuasive social media for competitive step counting , 2010, MindTrek.

[4]  Leif Singer,et al.  Influencing the adoption of software engineering methods using social software , 2012, 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[5]  Helen Sharp,et al.  Motivation in Software Engineering: A systematic literature review , 2008, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[6]  Richard N. Landers,et al.  Casual Social Games as Serious Games: The Psychology of Gamification in Undergraduate Education and Employee Training , 2011, Serious Games and Edutainment Applications.

[7]  Andrew Begel,et al.  Keeping up with your friends: function Foo, library Bar.DLL, and work item 24 , 2010, Web2SE '10.

[8]  Kurt Schneider,et al.  LIDs: A Light-Weight Approach to Experience Elicitation and Reuse , 2000, PROFES.

[9]  David R. Millen,et al.  Removing gamification from an enterprise SNS , 2012, CSCW.

[10]  E. Deci,et al.  Handbook of Self-Determination Research , 2002 .

[11]  Damon Centola,et al.  The Spread of Behavior in an Online Social Network Experiment , 2010, Science.

[12]  E. A. Locke,et al.  Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. A 35-year odyssey. , 2002, The American psychologist.