Catch the bug: Gamification in software testing

Gamification in quality assurance - Part 1

Playful approaches in software development are increasingly finding a place in everyday project work. They can also be used effectively and efficiently in quality assurance to strengthen team cohesion and improve product quality. We look at three aspects of software quality assurance in our series of articles: Product Quality, Process Quality and Risk Management. In the first part, we look at the use of gamification in software testing.

Since the advent of agility in software development, flexibility and team responsibility are no longer foreign words. Cross-functional teams act independently and take over all tasks in the development of the software product. Whereas different departments used to be responsible for development and - usually downstream - quality assurance, team members now take on these tasks themselves, for example testing. This costs time and effort.

While developers are usually interested in constructive results, software testing requires a destructive approach to the product. The goal is to find as many errors as possible, which initially seems negative from the developer's perspective. At the same time, testing is supposed to generate trust in the created software, which can only be achieved by looking at it objectively. Specialised testing experts also often find errors and problems in the software that are overlooked by pure developers. Since developers in the agile team now also take on testing tasks, the corresponding expertise must be distributed within the team. Manual testing tasks are furthermore often unpopular, although they are usually still necessary even with high test coverage with automated tests.

In a nutshell, the following ingredients for the success of the test tasks to be completed are often missing: the knowledge about testing and test procedures per se, the motivation for the necessary manual testing and the change to a different perspective. The consequences are too few, insufficient and inefficient tests and, ultimately, a threat to the success of the project.

Read the whole article in the current issue 4.2023 of Javamagazin.