Gamification for Modeling Tools – CEA – 2017
The goal of the application of the use of game design elements in non-game contexts to engage more external developers and end-users on Papyrus
Model Driven Engineering (MDE) has been widely recognized as a major advance in the design and development of complex systems that must respond to rapidly evolving target platforms and increasing functional complexity. With the emergence of large collaborative environments such as Eclipse projects, it becomes possible to capitalize on technologies to provide efficient tooling to support MDE activities.
Papyrus, a stable and powerful Open Source UML/SysML tool suite, goes in this direction. It helps MDE designers in the maintenance and evolution of the system by providing tooling support close to process practices and concepts used in the application domain. Furthermore, being based on Eclipse, it benefits from a world-wide visibility, reflected by the activity in the Eclipse forum and social media (i.e., YouTube, Twitter).
Despite such good conditions to become a very popular platform for both industrial and research activities around MDE, Papyrus is currently not able to exploit them to build a constant, large and self-motivated community of external developers and end-users that really contribute to the advancement of the platform.
Following the success obtained on several platforms (Foursquare , Jenkins , Jira , Visual Studio , etc.), the objective of this project is to apply the use of game design elements in non-game contexts (“Gamification”) to engage more external developers and end-users on Papyrus. Depending on the level and type of activity performed by end-users and developers, we could offer rewards that span from digital badges and physical goodies to trips and even maybe internship or job proposals.
Gamification for end-users
When it comes to using Papyrus for education purposes or for basic end-users, the tool might appear too detailed and powerful. A recent initiative, Papyrus for Education , tackles this issue and provides a set of mechanisms to adapt the tool to the user needs and expertise. Following such an initiative and to make the tool even more attractive for newbies, the objective is to build a set of modeling-related games (based on quizzes and quick exercises) on top of Papyrus that can be used to self-assess the modeling knowledge of the user and its familiarity with the tool and the UML/SysML languages in a playful way. We will also explore how these tests could be personalized based on the monitoring of the user activity on the platform as a way to detect what errors s/he is doing, what parts of the platform s/he is not exploring.
Gamification for developers
Monitoring and analyzing the activity of the community around a software project is paramount to assess its health and resilience. This requires gathering data of the community activity in different online sites and platforms. In particular, for this project, we will harvest data from the Papyrus tools (e.g., Papyrus Git repository, GitHub, Bugzilla and Eclipse forums). Then we will define several metrics on this data to determine the activity levels of each individual and his possible rewards based on the game levels defined.