Teaching Software Quality Assurance with Gamification and Continuous Feedback Techniques

Delivering high quality code is a critical success factor for any software project. Thus the teaching of proper software quality assurance skills presents an important objective for educational institutions. We conducted a single-case study in a student project environment to evaluate the improvement of the quality assurance process by measures of continuous feedback and elements of gamification and also have students gain experience with these measures in an industrial-like setup. Based on our data analysis, results suggest that the software quality and also learning experience can both be improved by our proposed measures. Moreover, key findings include that gamification can serve as a strong motivational driver to developers to deal with software quality issues and also facilitate knowledge transfer, but also that sufficient effort needs to be put into balancing the reward system to achieve a long-lasting effect.