Design of a pedagogic instrument for teaching software process improvement: Teaching instrument for university and business environments

Software development organizations focus their efforts and invest resources on improving their processes and motivating their teams. The goal of this initiative is to develop high quality software products; however, some difficulties related to the learning process can be found in the dynamics interactions of the professional teams within the organization. A potential cause for these difficulties can be attributed to the use and implementation of teaching methodologies with lower levels of team member motivation. Gamification offers a possible solution for these deficiencies providing more thought-provoking environments for the learning experience. In this paper we propose a teaching instrument based on the principles of gamification to achieve a required level of motivation in teams involved in process improvement. Thus, motivation makes possible a successful implementation of the continuous improvement cycle in software development organizations. © 2014 AISTI.