The Coding of Isaac

: Leveraging elements of video games to convey information about software quality and technical debt in the context of software visualization

Abstract

Software quality is an important element to manage in a development project in order to avoid ever increasing refactoring costs. Visualizing the current quality state of their code is one common way to help developers in this task. We believe that a video game-based visualization tool can help developers become more engaged and get a better overall picture of their code quality in a novel way. Which brings us to these two questions: How intuitive and accurate is the video game medium to visualize the software technical debt for industry practitioners and academics? How useful is the video game in visualizing the technical debt of software in the field? These questions are explored in this work through the development of a video game prototype and its evaluation through 12 semi-structured interviews and surveys. Players easily understood the relationship between the game and the metrics. The visual elements we designed and the overall structure of the game were intuitive to users. There is still room to improve the game to make it more engaging and useful to developers, it needs more gamification elements. The video game medium is an intuitive way to convey information about software quality and technical debt, although more gamification would improve it.

Date of Award	20 Jun 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Benoit Vanderose (Supervisor)