A systematic review of gamification in the context of software development landscapes

The software development process is a complex activity that has interrelating steps to produce software products. Human related social factors such as user motivation, engagement, communication and collaboration issues affect the activities performed by software development organizations. In fact, software engineering researchers seek better ways to overcome the human related issues so as to improve the quality in software development. Consequently, research has been conducted to introduce new methodologies, techniques and concepts. As such, gamification has been introduced as a novel technique to enhance the software development process and ultimately resolve some of the identified obstacles that are related to human factors. However, there is a bias to adopt the gamification into the software development process because there are still insufficient evidences about its positive outcomes. In this study, a systematic literature review was rigorously conducted to investigate the application and to reveal the benefits of gamification in the software development landscapes. This study contributes to the area of software engineering research by proposing a classification approach to categorize gamification studies in software development landscapes. The results of this research suggest that there has been a significant increase in empirical and theoretical studies that were recently published and many positive steps being taken towards better integration of gamification in software development organizations.