Titulo Estágio
Dashboard Gamificada de Gestão de Projectos de Software
Áreas de especialidade
Engenharia de Software
Local do Estágio
Departamento de Engenharia Informática da FCTUC |
Enquadramento
Since the NATO software conference in 1969, when the term 'software engineering' was first coined, several techniques, technologies and processes have been devised to overcome the so called, 'software crisis'. Thus, nowadays there is no shortage of know-how on how to effectively build quality software. The reasons on why we keep having so many problems in software development is mostly due to the difficulty of actually adopting such best practices by the software industry.
This problem has two dimensions:
1. Identify the best practices/processes that best apply to a specific organization, in a specific context, for a specific project.
2. Induce the adoption of such best practices by software development professionals.
There is a context that has been dealing with very similar issues quite sucessfully in the last decades: gaming!
Objetivo
In this Master thesis the students will address software development from a gaming perspective.
The goal of this thesis is to understand how different gaming mechanics can be applied to software process enforcement, by assessing dfferent strategies in real settings. After getting aware of state-of-art knowledge on game mechanics, and having defined a baseline software lifecycle (most likely agile), the students will perform action-research in real software companies to gather realistic data.
The end goal is not to build a gaming dashboard to software development, but rather study the effectiveness of different techniques to achieve different goals (e.g. improving testing, ensuring the enforcement of best practices, etc.). Actually these are inputs for such a future dashboard.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
-Problem definition
-State of art on gaming mechanics
-Definition of the baseline agile lifecycle to be targetted.
-Characterization of the best practices to be enforced.
-Experiment design.
-Characterization of the companies where experiments will be performed.
-Development of the game mechanics to be applied.
-Intermediate defense report preparation.
-Integration of the feedback from the intermediate defense.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
The second semester will be devoted to parallel/iterative execution of the different techniques to be assessed. Below follows the structure on one such cycle:
1. Integration with the target company repository.
2. Collection of baseline data.
3. Deployment of the gaming dashboard.
4. Data Collection
5. Analysis
Consolidation and final report preparation.
Condições
This is a research project in cooperation with several software conmpanies located (mostly) in Coimbra. Thus the student will get a comprehensive perspectve of the local software industry.
No scholarship is currently available to support this project, but a laptop will be provided, as well as a desk place in the SSE (Software and Systems Engineering) research lab.
The student will meet regularly (two to three times a week) with the advisor to discuss the project, in what we expect to be a enthusiastic, intellectually challenging activity.
Orientador
Mário Zenha-Rela
mzrela@dei.uc.pt 📩