论文标题
成就解锁:关于行业中游戏的DevOps实践的案例研究
Achievement Unlocked: A Case Study on Gamifying DevOps Practices in Industry
论文作者
论文摘要
游戏化是在非游戏上下文中使用游戏元素(例如点,排行榜和徽章)的使用,以鼓励个人与环境互动的人的期望行为。最近,游戏化已进入软件工程环境,以此作为向从业者推广某些活动的手段。先前的研究调查了使用游戏化来促进采用各种工具和实践的使用,但是,这些研究要么是在教育环境中进行的,要么是在该行业的中小型开发人员中进行的。 我们对基于徽章的游戏化在促进一家大型公司采用DevOps实践的影响方面进行了大规模的混合方法研究,并评估了实践采用与333个软件项目的关键交付,质量和吞吐量指标的变化有关。我们观察到一些游戏化的DevOps实践的加速采用至少60%,而采用率提高了6倍。在关联徽章采用和度量更改时,我们发现了不同的结果:获得测试徽章的团队显示出较大的固定提交,但输出更少的提交和提取请求;获得代码审查和高质量工具徽章的团队显示出更快的交付指标。最后,我们的实证研究补充了45个开发人员的调查,其中73%的受访者发现徽章有助于学习和采用新的标准化实践。我们的结果有助于对游戏化的丰富知识,并具有真正的行业从业人员的独特而重要的观点。
Gamification is the use of game elements such as points, leaderboards, and badges in a non-game context to encourage a desired behavior from individuals interacting with an environment. Recently, gamification has found its way into software engineering contexts as a means to promote certain activities to practitioners. Previous studies investigated the use of gamification to promote the adoption of a variety of tools and practices, however, these studies were either performed in an educational environment or in small to medium-sized teams of developers in the industry. We performed a large-scale mixed-methods study on the effects of badge-based gamification in promoting the adoption of DevOps practices in a very large company and evaluated how practice adoption is associated with changes in key delivery, quality, and throughput metrics of 333 software projects. We observed an accelerated adoption of some gamified DevOps practices by at least 60%, with increased adoption rates up to 6x. We found mixed results when associating badge adoption and metric changes: teams that earned testing badges showed an increase in bug fixing commits but output fewer commits and pull requests; teams that earned code review and quality tooling badges exhibited faster delivery metrics. Finally, our empirical study was supplemented by a survey with 45 developers where 73% of respondents found badges to be helpful for learning about and adopting new standardized practices. Our results contribute to the rich knowledge on gamification with a unique and important perspective from real industry practitioners.