Gamification of software engineering tasks improve developer engagement, but has been limited to mechanisms such as points and badges. We believe that a tool that provides developers an interface analogous to computer games can represent the gamification of software engineering tasks more effectively via software visualization. We introduce CityVR — an interactive software visualization tool that implements the city metaphor technique using virtual reality in an immersive 3D environment medium to boost developer engagement in software comprehension tasks. We evaluated our tool with a case study based on ArgoUML. We measured engagement in terms of feelings, interaction, and time perception. We report on how our design choices relate to developer engagement. We found that developers i) felt curious, immersed, in control, excited, and challenged, ii) spent considerable interaction time navigating and selecting elements, and iii) perceived that time passed faster than in reality, and therefore were willing to spend more time using the tool to solve software engineering tasks.
Leonel Merino, Johannes Fuchs, Michael Hund, Craig Anslow, Mohammad Ghafari, Oscar Nierstrasz, Michael Behrisch, and Daniel Keim. On the Impact of the Medium in the Effectiveness of 3D Software Visualizations. In Proceedings of the IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), Shanghai, China, 2017.
Leonel Merino, Mohammad Ghafari, Craig Anslow, and Oscar Nierstrasz. CityVR: Gameful Software Visualization. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Shanghai, China, 2017.
