Game-based learning (GBL) has emerged as a powerful instrument for enhancing student engagement and motivation in education. This paper evaluates the impact of Gamify-IT, an educational game designed for programming education, on student motivation and learning experiences. Building on the original Gamify-IT concept, we extended it with novel features, including diverse minigames, leaderboards, and a redesigned achievement system, to align with Marczewski's HEXAD player types. The platform was used in a first-semester programming course by about 100 students, and its impact was evaluated through comparative analyses of two cohorts in consecutive CS1 programming courses: one limited to traditional teaching methods and the other incorporating Gamify-IT. Our results demonstrate that Gamify-IT has a positive impact on student motivation, as evidenced by higher initial and sustained motivation levels throughout the semester. Feedback from a survey regarding the usefulness and experiences of the platform highlights its strengths, including an engaging and innovative learning approach, game design, and visuals, while also identifying areas for improvement, such as addressing technical issues and expanding game variety. Despite these challenges, Gamify-IT demonstrates the potential of GBL in programming education, offering valuable insights for designing inclusive and effective gamified educational tools for programming education.

ABSTRACT Domain The deployment of distributed multi‐component cloud applications typically requires a combination of multiple heterogeneous deployment technologies. A different combination of deployment technologies should be chosen due to varying deployment qualities, such as the functional suitability and reliability of the deployment technologies for the deployment of the components. A suboptimal selection of deployment technologies makes the deployment error‐prone. Problem Selecting and maintaining the combination of deployment technologies requires modeling effort and expertise. Contributions We present a method that automatically selects deployment technologies based on a knowledge base of deployment scenarios and corresponding deployment qualities of deployment technologies. Evaluation We show the practical applicability and the usefulness of our method. For the practical applicability, we conduct two case studies based on an open‐source reference architecture application and a real‐world industry application using a prototypical implementation of our method. For the usefulness, we conduct a user study in which participants assign deployment technologies with and without our method. Conclusions Our method is a useful contribution that reduces the modeling effort and the required expertise when maintaining the combination of deployment technologies. Further, our method enhances the deployment quality.

Abstract Modern component-based architectural styles, e.g., microservices, enable developing the components independently from each other. However, this independence can result in problems when it comes to managing issues, such as bugs, as developer teams can freely choose their technology stacks, such as issue management systems (IMSs), e.g., Jira, GitHub, or Redmine. In the case of a microservice architecture, if an issue of a downstream microservice depends on an issue of an upstream microservice, this must be both identified and communicated, and the downstream service’s issues should link to its causing issue. However, agile project management today requires efficient communication, which is why more and more teams are communicating through comments in the issues themselves. Unfortunately, IMSs are not integrated with each other, thus, semantically linking these issues is not supported, and identifying such issue dependencies from different IMSs is time-consuming and requires manual searching in multiple IMS technologies. This results in many context switches and prevents developers from being focused and getting things done. Therefore, in this paper, we present a concept for seamlessly integrating different IMS technologies into each other and providing a better architectural context. The concept is based on augmenting the websites of issue management systems through a browser extension. We validate the approach with a prototypical implementation for the Chrome browser. For evaluation, we conducted expert interviews, which approved that the presented approach provides significant advantages for managing issues of agile microservice architectures.