Gamifying requirements: An empirical analysis of game-based technique for novices

Requirements elicitation is a process that involves gathering requirements for a given project. Several studies have been published suggesting strategies to improve the requirements gathering process. Using game-based and crowd-based approaches, researchers are extracting requirements that are useful for product development today. This study follows the same line of research. This research study aims to improve the understanding of the requirements gathering process by novices or students through different activities: (I) knowledge of requirements gathering method and (II) techniques or activities viable for software requirements (education). Important methods used to address the above objectives are as follows: (I) a comprehensive review of the literature to understand requirements gathering; (II) designing an activity to embed RE challenges and RE sub-activities; and (III) experiment, survey, and observation to collect data and to assess the proposed methods' effectiveness. The suggested activity for requirement gathering is based on the game tic-tac-toe. The participants suggest that the design of the activity is helpful in brainstorming and is also valuable for identifying requirements; moreover, a post questionnaire has been designed to determine the learning of the participants regarding the proposed activity. We can observe simply from the coefficients that both skills and challenges (as perceived by the participants) have positive impacts on engagement, immersion, and perceived learning. The proposed activity helps novices or students gain (basic) knowledge of the requirements gathering process/technique; the outlined activity can be a way of learning requirements and gathering knowledge (basic). From this study, we conclude that the proposed activity has positive results and is helpful for participants to get a better understanding of the requirements engineering method(s).