Investigating Information System Testing Gamification with Time Restrictions on Testers’ Performance

Abstract

This paper presents the results obtained from the evaluation of gamified software testing platform that was developed following series of focus group discussions comprising of software developers and testers. The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of gamification as an additive method that can help improve the performance of software testers. Additionally in this study, new metrics have been introduced to quantify the performance of software testers fairly and more accurately. Moreover, the effect of time restriction impacting on the performance of software testers will be discussed from results of this study. Findings suggest that the proposed metrics, which more accurately capture the difficulty level of the software code defects, are able to better analyse and compare the performances of software testers in the gamified testing environment. Moreover, results indicated that time restriction may compromise the performance of software testers and the quality of written software test code. On the other hand, results suggest that the performance of software testers in detecting low priority bugs in the gamified software-testing platform was better compared to the other more difficult to detect bugs.