On the gamification of human-centric traceability tasks in software testing and coding

Abstract

Traceability is the ability to trace the influence of one software artifact on another by linking dependencies. Test-to-code traceability (relationships between test and system code) plays a vital role in the production, verification, reliability and certification of highly dependable systems. In practical settings, however, traceability tasks are most often observed in the breach by human developers/testers. Prior research works on test-to-code traceability in software engineering do not provide high traceability output and accuracy as they mainly rely on sought-after approaches to recover links. Gamified Software Engineering (GSE) is a growing field that in particular taps into gamification, the application of game mechanics in non-game contexts, to address human-related concerns in the field of SE. This paper argues that a new gamified approach is necessary to tackle the human issue of capturing traceability information in a by-product manner. Thus, it advocates for the induction of gamification concepts in software traceability. We propose a conceptual framework where the gamification is infusing engagement into human-centric traceability tasks to record trace links. An empirical evaluation was performed to assess the performance of the framework compared with a state-of-the-art approach.