Aplicando gamificação no ensino de teste de software

Abstract

The responsibility of Software Testing is to make sure the software quality through its techniques and practices. However, even having considerable importance, Software Testing has its techniques underused by software companies, what has a direct impact on software quality. Some reasons pointing out by literature for this fact is the testing activities are costly, difficult and tedious. This problem is found in both industry and academ, where some these are born in the academy and extend into the industry. As a possible solution to treat this kind of problem there is the gamification, that conceptually is the use of game design elements in environments non-game, with the purpose of increasing engagement and motivation of people involved in that environment. Recent studies have shown the grown adoption of gamified strategies in the Software Testing teaching to treat motivational problems of students. Given this context, this research work intends to develop a gamified approach to deal with motivational problems of students in specific software testing activities. To achieve this objective we carried out a search in the literature seeking gamification methodologies and a systematic mapping study that gathered studies about the application of gamification and games in Software Testing area. The gamification methodology chosen was the Level Up, that describes an interactive and systematic process to concept gamified approaches for educational environments. This methodology provides a set of stages that cover the ideate stage, experimentation and evolution of the approach. In all, two iterations of Level Up were carried out, the first to define the approach and the second to its refinement. In both, prototypes of the gamified approach were developed, which were tested in the experimentation stage. Each experiment had an evaluation, the first one was performed with a small group of students, in which the objective was to validate the game design elements selected, and the second one was performed with a class of 36 students, in which the objective was to evaluate the gamified approach regarding learning. In both experiments, the impact of the proposed approach on student motivation was evidenced. However, in the second experiment, the results collected did not provide sufficient evidence to infer that gamification has a better effect on learning compared to the traditional teaching model. Finally, the features for the development of a system to support the gamification approach, as well as the related gamut systems, are described.