Investigating the Effect of Gamification on a Software Engineering Company

Abstract: The aim of this Degree Project is to investigate how gamification can affect a software engineering startup company which uses the Scrum framework. The first part of the investigation focused on how to gamify the Scrum framework for a team of 6 people and on how the gamified Scrum framework affected the goals fulfillment. The second part of the investigation focused on how the gamified Scrum was received by the startup organization and on the effects that the gamified Scrum had on the motivation of the team. The investigation was carried out as an action research, where I as a change agent joined the company and became the Scrum master for the time frame of the project.   The game, Climbing Mount Scrum, was designed with the help of the GOAL framework and the Octalysis framework. The data collection was realized through both Quantitative and Qualitative methods. This mixed approach made it possible to investigate the research questions from more perspectives.   The Degree Project intends to show that gamification is a tool that can help to small organizations to manage their Scrum framework better while also increasing the team spirit within the company. The conclusion indicates that introducing a gamified tool wouldn’t be hard to implement for similarly opened minded team as the one investigated in this project. However, there are some limitations as the timeframe of the project was two months which is too short to draw long term conclusions regarding the success of increasing the performance of the team.