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Game Developers Could Benefit from Gamifying Management

Software and game development can benefit from incorporating game mechanics into the team management, argues Monica Wells. Photo by Jennie Faber

Software and game development can benefit from incorporating game mechanics into the team management, argues Monica Wells. Photo by Jennie Faber

Gamification continues to be the talk of town for project managers in various industries. Software and game development is no exception. Developers should be using gamification to build a passionate and creative team. And aren’t those features essential in every successful game development?

Here are some tips on how to apply and get the most of gamification in the context of game development.

The Perks of Gamification

A study conducted by Gartner showed that by 2015, more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will develop at least one gamified app, and 50 percent of companies responsible for research and innovation will use gamification as a means of driving innovation.

Gamification has proven itself to be more than just another passing fad. It’s slowly entering the mainstream of corporate computing, primarily because its practice brings about considerable results.

But first of all, what exactly is gamification? It’s simply an application of game dynamics into a non-game context, such as software or game development, where it can foster employee engagement by granting rewards and recognition. Gamification helps to keep devs motivated to achieve the best end results possible. With points, levels and badges, companies can provide a great incentive for action by appealing to the competitive nature of humans.

Gamification in Context

Before applying gamification to our team of game developers, we must ask ourselves a question: What are the short-term and long-term goals we’d like to accomplish? Successful development teams are usually characterized by easy collaboration, effective teamwork, team enthusiasm and active participation, as well as quality deliverables. Common challenges include innovation, delivering high-quality software on time, meeting performance benchmarks or managing the behavior of employees.

Gamification can help managers to deal with some of those challenges, provided the game mechanics suit very well the context – gamification can be applied in many activities, starting with code quality and performance improvement to knowledge management and delivery within a set time frame. Gamification strategies will depend on the aspect of game development we’d like to work on.

Gamification – Tools and Strategies

As any game developer can tell you, game mechanics are all about points, collaboration, levels, challenges, leader boards, scoreboards, badges, fun and rewards – all employed to engage and drive devs to outsmart the competition.

Big organizations would often employ game designers to provide them with working frameworks that ensure the efficiency of gamification – it requires a transparent process of tracking the progress, recognizing particularly talented employees and providing real-time feedback.

Why is a well-designed game framework a must? In 2012, Gartner argued that by 2014 over 80 percent of gamified processes will fail – due to reasons like poor design or improper rules.  That’s why managers should treat gamification seriously – conducted poorly, it can negatively impact team dynamics.

To see how a professionally developed gamification framework looks like, have a look at this one created by Yu-Kai Chou called Octalysis.

Gamified Software Development – A Case Study

In an article on gamification practices, Senthil Rajamarthandan, Senior Manager at Cognizant, presented a few cases of gamification application in software development. One of them was 3Curve Contest, which is an excellent example of how gamification can help to improve team performance and code quality.

At the outset, he explains that the cost of quality was high – almost 20 percent of the team’s effort was lost on code reviews and tests cases. Combined with other problems, code quality became hard to measure. The goal of the proposed game was achieving high quality of code, improving performance and completing tasks within time deadlines.

The team was encouraged to showcase their performance, working under SONAR, an open-source tool for code analysis. Leader board was published every Friday and featured categories like Best module of the week, Best developer of the week, Feature completion on time, SONAR code quality and Performance improvements using PDD (performance driven development). At the very end of the game, the best of the best gained awards and recognition for their excellent effort.

The results of the game were of great importance to the structure of the development process. Among the most important goals achieved by the game were: reduction of quality cost by 75 percent thanks to automation of code quality checks, reduction of performance-related problems at the later stage of the development cycle, and improvements in progress monitoring through automated scripts run on the basis of their current version of source control system.

All in all, the goals set at the beginning of the game were met and the team had lots of fun while being rewarded – in total, the employer held out more than 190 awards and recognitions.

This case study proves that gamification can provide an interesting way to spice up the usual activities of a developer team. This can be vital in game development, where enthusiasm and passion are the driving forces in the creation of great games and can be boosted through gamification.

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Monica Wells Monica Wells is a statistics enthusiast who masterminded a couple of education projects. The most recent one, BizDb.co.uk, is one-stop business directory that takes UK company searching into the next level. Apart from her online activities, Monica also describes herself as a passionate educator.