Software development is a challenging, but seldom amusing activity. At the same time, gamification, a recent trend that brings game mechanics to websites and interactive media, together with many past works that propose the use of serious games to teach software engineering in a fun way, show evidence that this type of real-world activity can also incorporate game design elements. In this work, we propose a novel approach: incorporating game mechanics directly into a software development process, effectively turning it into a live game. We show interesting results from a case study with a production team of a software house, and firmly believe it is important that the game academic community spreads this type of knowledge to influence other research areas.

Software development, in many moments, is an exciting and challenging activity, but it can present itself as a boring endeavour in others. At the same time, the introduction of game elements into efforts such as the teaching of Software Engineering shows that real-world activities can assemble game design elements and that it can make them more engaging. In this work, it is proposed the introduction of game design elements in software development, especially in the Scrum process. For this, elements are included to stimulate adherence to the prescriptions of the process, besides stimulating the execution of more activities by the team, positively impacting the productivity of a project. The authors present the idealised mechanics and the results obtained from the accomplishment of a case study in a software development team in a private company. Overall, the gamification applied to software development stimulated developers to perform their daily tasks, although this result did not generate strong evidence of increased productivity.

Software development is sometimes considered a boring task. To avoid this fact we propose an approach based on the incorporation of game mechanics into Scrum framework, in order to change its use to a more amusing task, by taking advantage of the gamification trend. Gamification is applied to non-game applications and processes, trying to encourage people to adopt them. This work shows a suggestion of Scrum gamification together with an evaluation of the proposed approach in a case study of a software house. The use of this concept can help the software industry to increase the team productivity in a natural way.