Abstract With the emergence of social coding platforms, collaboration has become a key and dynamic aspect to the success of software projects. In such platforms, developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration in open‐source software development. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software systems than any developer could produce alone. Several approaches have investigated collaboration challenges, for instance, by proposing or evaluating models and tools to support collaborative work. Despite the undeniable importance of the existing efforts in this direction, there are few works on collaboration from perspectives of developers. In this work, we aim to investigate the perceptions of open‐source software developers on collaborations, such as motivations, techniques, and tools to support global, productive, and collaborative development. Following an ad hoc literature review, an exploratory interview study with 12 open‐source software developers fromGitHub, our novel approach for this problem also relies on an extensive survey with 121 developers to confirm or refute the interview results. We found different collaborative contributions, such as managing change requests. Besides, we observed that most collaborators prefer to collaborate with the core team instead of their peers. We also found that most collaboration happens in software development (60%) and maintenance (47%) tasks. Furthermore, despite personal preferences to work independently, developers still consider collaborating with others in specific task categories, for instance, software development. Finally, developers also expressed the importance of the social coding platforms, such asGitHub, to support maintainers, and contributors in making decisions and developing tasks of the projects. Therefore, these findings may help project leaders optimize the collaborations among developers and reduce entry barriers. Moreover, these findings may support the project collaborators in understanding the collaboration process and engaging others in the project.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents that the use of gamification - the adoption of game elements in non- game contexts - is a recurring theme in software engineering education literature in the last decade. Gamification has been largely used to increase the engagement and motivation of students and professionals in their organizations, with a variety of models/frameworks for developing gamified approaches. Studies report positive and negative outcomes from the adoption of gamification. However, generalization is difficult because: (i) the evaluation data are heavily coupled to context and individual characteristics of participants, (ii) there are often insufficient detail on the design of evaluation procedures, hampering replication, (iii) there is lack of significant statistical data and imprecision of qualitative data, and (iv) there are no standard models in use to support the evaluation of gamification, hence there are no standardization in design, data analysis and report of gamification evaluation. The empirical data published so far are not sufficient to elucidate the phenomena resulting from the use of gamification, as there is no standardization in the specification of evaluation strategies, methods of analysis and reporting of results. Therefore, the objective of this study is to present and discuss the use of a framework for the evaluation of gamification in the context of software engineering education and training. For this, we executed a case study, in which the framework was used to support the design of an evaluation study for a gamification case in a knowledge management research group in a public university. Our main findings are: the framework helped streamlining the design of the evaluation study, considering the consistency between data to be collected, evaluation questions, and the goals of the evaluation study, that different rounds of analysis are supported, and that analysis of data relating to one evaluation question can complement analysis of other questions.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents that the gamification has been used to motivate and engage participants in software engineering education and training. The effects of gamification in this area have been studied and reported since 2011. However, there are no studies that propose standard procedures for evaluating gamification in the specific context of software engineering education and training. As a result, each study proposes their own evaluation procedures, making it difficult to compare approaches. The standardization of criteria, measures and indicators can allow an objective comparison between primary studies on gamification in software engineering, reinforcing results and revealing trends. Thus, the objective of this study is to propose and evaluate a framework for the evaluation of gamification in the context of software engineering education and training. The proposed framework focus on the structural aspect of an evaluation, consisting of concepts (entities) and their relationships. The development of this framework consisted of three steps: (1) the definition of the framework structure, based on the results of a systematic review of the literature on evaluation of gamification in software engineering education and practice, and its adequation to the GQIM (Goal-Question-Indicator-Metric) model; (2) an ad hoc review of this framework by three researchers; and (3) the execution of a PoC (Proof of Concept) evaluation, in order to perform an preliminar assessment of the framework adequacy. As a result, we were able to use the framework to model the evaluation of two primary studies, documenting the items found in these studies, which revealed the existence of a common measure between the two studies (Total lines of code, or LOC). The existence of only one common measure in both evaluations makes it difficult to compare the results of the studies. Additionally, we observed that one of the studies did not present information to justify the choice of the measures used in its evaluation and did not summarize all the data collected in its evaluation procedures. Therefore, the use of the framework might be useful to identify points of improvement for the validity of evaluation studies.

In globally distributed software development, many software developers have to collaborate and deal with issues of collaboration. Although collaboration is challenging, collaborative development produces better software than any developer could produce alone. Unlike previous work which focuses on the proposal and evaluation of models and tools to support collaborative work, this paper presents an interview study aiming to understand (i) the motivations, (ii) how collaboration happens, and (iii) the challenges and barriers of collaborative software development. After interviewing twelve experienced software developers from GitHub, we found different types of collaborative contributions, such as in the management of requests for changes. Our analysis also indicates that the main barriers for collaboration are related to non-technical, rather than technical issues.

The use of games and game elements in software engineering education is not new. In fact, their use in Software Engineering education is found in research papers since 1974, with a notorious increase after 2000. However, there is little information about the actual adoption of these approaches in software engineering education. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to investigate the use of games and game elements in software engineering education, in the perspective of educators. To achieve this goal, this study proposes and analyzes the results of a survey answered by 88 software engineering professors. We sample the participants by inviting 285 educators mined from one hundred well-stablished universities and educational institutions of different regions of Brazil. The goal of the survey is (i) to collect information about the use of games and gamification in classrooms and (ii) to understand the relation of ACM/IEEE knowledge areas and the used game-related methods. The results show that most of the professors are aware of these educational approaches, the games were adopted by only 21 participants and game elements were only adopted by 19 participants. Games are most used to cover “Software Process” and “Project Management”. The most used game elements are Points, Quizzes, and Challenges. The results also show that the main reasons for not adopting the resources are the lack of knowledge, lack of information about relevant games for teaching software engineering, and the lack of time to plan and include these approaches in the classroom. Finally, results show a positive tendency towards the future adoption of these game-related approaches by the software engineering professors.

The worldwide demand for software developers are increasing, however, students are facing problems to learn programming at universities. To make things worse, the failure and dropout rates are high, especially in introductory computer programming courses. To address this type of problem, new strategies have been proposed to engage students in programming courses. One strategy is to use game elements to learn programming. Game elements are important for the success or failure of an educational serious game. In the same way, the students' learning process may benefit from proper use of game elements. In this work, we aim to identify and evaluate which game elements contribute to the students' learning in programming education. We performed 19 user studies to investigate the impact on learning of game elements present in two serious games for learning programming. The study was carried out with students from introductory periods of the undergraduate program in Information Systems. Our results identify some game elements that have positive effect on learning programming. The students' feedback also indicates that game elements help them staying focused, engaged and that games are useful complementary resource for learning process.

The software industry presents dissatisfaction in relation to the level of recently graduated professionals. Consequently, software companies end up investing in the training of these professionals in order to develop skills related to the software development process. This paper presents an experience report of an adaptation of industry training practices in a course of Software Engineering (SE). Initially, we mapped SE topics of the ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines to the specific practices of the CMMI-DEV model. Then, we carried out a survey of training strategies with 10 consultants in Software Process Improvement (SPI), who also act as SE professors. Finally, these strategies have been adapted and incorporated in a SE Course. We compared the impact of these learning strategies in relation to traditional teaching approaches, regarding the student perception of learning. We observed an increase of approximately 20 percent in student perception of learning in relation to the SE topics with industry training strategies.

Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification is a relatively new trend that has been applied in various domains, including Software Engineering. However, few studies have explored the potential of gamification in the context of Software Engineering education. In this paper, we describe an experience of introducing two game elements, namely badges and leaderboards, in an introductory Software Engineering course. Our goal is to evaluate the students' perception on the impact of these elements in their motivation towards the course. We conducted a survey with 18 participants for quantitative results, and a series of interviews with 6 participants for a qualitative perspective on the results. We observed that students received badges positively, while there were mixed results about the use of leaderboards in our strategy. The main benefits on the use of these elements is that they provide social recognition rewards for students. In addition, the use of badges establishes further objectives for students to strive for, besides grades and approval.

quality models and standards guide Software Process Improvement Initiatives.Usually aiming to establish the best practices to instruct the definition of processes and support organizational assessment of the maturity and capability level.However, despite these initiatives, the best practices application in Brazilian public organizations is impaired by various obstacles regarding the process of Contracting IT solutions by the Federal Public Administration (APF), the main contractor of software and services in Brazil.Among these obstacles the ones that stand out are process complexity and the continuous supervision of control bodies.In order to minimize these obstacles, the court Union Accounts (TCU), recommended the establishment of the Normative Instruction SLTI/MPOG 04/2014, containing guidelines for the acquirement of IT Solutions and a Guide for Contracting IT Solutions (GCSTI).This work aims at identifying the maturity and adherence of GCSTI relative to CMMI models.To achieve this goal, defined and carried out a method of mapping between GCSTI and CMMI models.The survey results show the maturity and adherence to CMMI models based on procedures defined in GCSTI.