Turning Real-World Software Development into a Game

Software development is a challenging, but seldom amusing activity. At the same time, gamification, a recent trend that brings game mechanics to websites and interactive media, together with many past works that propose the use of serious games to teach software engineering in a fun way, show evidence that this type of real-world activity can also incorporate game design elements. In this work, we propose a novel approach: incorporating game mechanics directly into a software development process, effectively turning it into a live game. We show interesting results from a case study with a production team of a software house, and firmly believe it is important that the game academic community spreads this type of knowledge to influence other research areas.