Gamification of Static Analysis Tools

The challenge

Automated status analysis tools provide programmers with warnings about the source code. These issues are not compiler errors. The program still works, however, these warnings may lead to maintainability issues in the future. Some examples of warnings are lack of documentation or bad naming scheme according to coding conventions. If these issues are not dealt with, they keep on growing as the source code grows. Programmers are not always keen to deal with these issues because they are seen as tedious tasks to resolve. The goal of my project is to motivate programmers to deal with these issues.

The solution

The solution I proposed during my master thesis is a gamification platform in which the whole team takes part. Each commit is analyzed and the amount of warnings resolved is kept track of. Based on the warnigns resolved, the gamification platform creates an environment to motivate developers to deal with these issues. The gamification platform uses points, badges, the progress of warnings resolved, and competition to stimulate motivation pertaining to these issues.