Gamification in Software Development: Systematic Literature Review

Since 2010, gamification has become a trend to motivate someone in various ways. Gamification is a new concept in software engineering that influences the software development process. Along with the increase of gamification frameworks, gamification is a means to increase motivation and opportunities for successful project completion. The issue with gamification adoption is a dearth of a methodology or framework for developing a gamification system. To overcome this challenge, we employed the Kitchenham approach in this systematic literature study on gamification in software development over the last five years. This study aims to comprehend gamification framework design, gamification aspects, and the software development mechanism. We bolded that the most important thing to make gamification succeed is using the correct game elements. The results show that point is the most widely-used gamification element in the software development area, followed by level, badge, social engagement challenges-quest, leaderboards, voting, and betting. These findings will be used as inputs for further research into integrating the correct elements and framework in developing a gamification system for the software development industry. Another result showed that none of the studied papers used a common framework to build gamification in software development. It implies that the designers used their frameworks and built gamification from scratch. Consequently, it becomes a challenge and opportunity to be resolved in future research. We suggest that further studies develop mature frameworks that can be used in the software development area.