Elicit, specify, require, revise: enhancing requirements engineering process using gamification

Abstract Requirements engineering (RE) faces challenges due to the required collaboration and knowledge transfer among analysts, developers, and customers. Motivation theories have occasionally been used to analyze and encourage stakeholder motivation and engagement in RE tasks. Specifically, gamification mechanisms have been applied to software engineering tasks, in particular RE tasks, to promote stakeholder engagement. However, existing research lacks a rigorous method for designing gamified environments for RE tasks. This paper describes the development of a novel ESDR (Elicitation, Specification, Design, and Revision) method that leverages task types, task paradigms, gamification mechanisms, and motivation theories. The model was used as the basis for two case studies, yielding interesting results on student motivation and perceptions towards gamification. For the second case study, a socio-technical environment was developed to allow for gamified requirements elicitation and specification. This environment enables researchers and team managers to select different mechanisms to gamify the current RE task in practice. The environment was evaluated by students, providing anecdotal results. The key contributions are the proposed ESDR method integrating gamification and motivation theories into RE tasks, insights from two case studies applying this method, and the development of a gamified socio-technical environment for RE.