Software is a cornerstone in the development of societies. In software process improvement initiatives, change management has been identified as one of the crucial areas to manage. Top managers are also crucial in software process improvement and their commitment and support is key to obtain the benefits of a better and leaner software process. Gamification is a new solution to foster and engage process management and has been pointed out as a solution for transformational change and, additionally, it can foster the adoption of SPI improvements and the visibility of financial benefits in order to increase top managers’ commitment. This paper aims to draw a path for top managers to use gamification as a tool to get the improvement gains in SPI settings.
Software is key for many industries from business to government or military operations [1] and the
software industry is one of the most important sectors in the world [2]. In order to meet the increasing
software needs, companies around the globe make a tremendous effort in Software Process Improvement
(SPI) efforts[3]. SPI is a systematic approach to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of a software
development organization and to enhance software products [4]. The two most internationally used SPI
models are Capability Maturity Model Integratio
n (CMMI) and ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE). These models
define a process improvement approach that provide organizations with the essential elements to set process
improvement goals, establish a point of reference for assessing current processes and support the
improvement of their performance [5]. SPI methods help to continuously refine and adjust the software
process to improve its performance in terms of lead-time, quality of the software product, reduction of change
requests, and so forth [6].
Normally, SPI projects are large-scale, complex organization-wide change initiatives and they require
considerable investment in personnel, time and money and impact just about every aspect of software firms
[7]. Thus, extensive literature has been devoted to studying its challenges and facilitators. Focusing on the
first group literature underlines several aspects including, among others, change management, one of the main
problems to tackle in SPI initiatives [8–11]. Traditional change management studies suggest that in order to
get results from initiatives four related organizational elements must change: process, structure, management
and people [12]. Regarding the latter, people can be seen as
the main factor in SPI that needs to be encouraged
and supported in an organization [13]. Thus, in change environments all the people in the organization are
required to (i) change their attitude, and (ii) acquire and practice new behaviors and skills aimed at
improvement and better performance [14]. Attitude towards change is one of the people aspects in modern
process improvement management approaches [15], and given that top managers are supporting SPI
initiatives, it is important to support their duties with sound tools. On the other hand, gamification, as is
explained in Section 4, is seen as one of the enablers in commitment and acceptation of change from both
organizational and personal side. Taking this into account, this paper presents a new approach to change
management in SPI initiatives based on the use of gamification techniques to support SPI processes. Given
that SPI is intended to affect all kind of organizations that include software among its assets, this paper
concerns all these companies. The main contribution of this
work is to gather together all fields of study in a
single paper to bring an overview about the opportunities of research on the field.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the main concepts and implications
of change management focusing the discussion on top managers, Section 3 reviews the main issues of change
management and SPI initiatives, Section 4 presents gamification as a new tool of SPI and, finally, section 5
includes the main conclusions and outlines future work.
Gamification, grounded in psychology and technology, is aimed at revolutionizing business and
educational environments alike. This paper has presente
d a tailored gamification process to be implemented in
SPI environments, focusing on change management. Specifically, this work suggested that insight into
gamification as a complement to software process improvement and innovation should make important
improvements on these initiatives with regard to their impact on information systems contribution to business
goals.
Future works will be devoted to testing the proposal in order to get sound research results in SPI settings
together with the design of gamification proposals for other technological environments. Apart from that and
given the expectatives raised by gamified systems to get relevant data on processes, it is intended to take full
advantage of these data by analyzing and exploring these results. This will lead this preliminary research into
a detailed study that will reveal important insights on the support of gamification to SPI initiatives.
