Gamified Acquisition of Software Feedback

Abstract

Efficient and successful software maintenance and evolution processes could lead to better quality software applications, which could meet the end-user’s requirements and preferences. A decisive contribution to software mainte- nance and evolution could be achieved by defining more adequate and effec- tive feedback acquisition practices in combination with the use of gamifica- tion principles. The overall objective of this study is to create and validate a feedback acquisition framework which will be embedded in already exist- ing applications and will engage and motivate the users by exploiting the advantages of gamification elements. To achieve this, we realized a concep- tual solution by performing literature search and assessing current feedback acquisition practices. Furthermore, with the implementation of the most important functional requirements of such a framework. Last but not least, we validated the usability and effectiveness of our framework by execut- ing a controlled experiment between a treatment and a control group. Each group provided feedback remarks by using our gamified feedback acquisition mechanism and an existing feedback acquisition tool respectively. Experi- ment results and analysis indicate that our developed tool appeared to be more usable and more effective on acquiring feedback remarks, compared to the existing feedback acquisition mechanism used for the experiment.