This chapter tackles the difficulty of implementing agile methodologies in enterprises, especially for teams who are used to traditional working methods. Therefore, this work attempts to provide ways to engage better and motivate team members to embrace the use of agile methodologies. One such way has considered using gamification or serious games principles with agile/scrum activities. The main contribution of the present work is threefold. First, it provides a novel blended approach that combines agile principles with gamification mechanics and gameplay. Second, an adaptation approach is provided to adapt all gamification aspects such as gamification purpose and fun applied to agile/scrum activities to consider the enterprise's context, the specificities of the project, and those of the working teams. Finally, the proposed approaches have been instrumented through a mobile app. Experimentation of the approaches allowed the authors to draw interesting findings.
TopIntroduction
Companies are increasingly facing rude competition and market positioning problems. The market is currently distinguished by increased dynamicity and rapid continuous change in consumer needs and requirements. To tackle this kind of problems, on the one hand companies must offer products and services which are reliable, robust, of high quality and which meet the needs of their customers without at the same time exceeding budget and deadlines. On the other hand, they are supposed to respond quickly to this need through efficient development and management methods and processes. This is true for existing products or services as well as for development projects of new services and products. Particularly, to achieve their objectives, companies must develop their capacities to implement strategies and methods of planning and efficiently managing collaborative projects and teamwork.
Currently, two large families of project planning and management approaches do exist: classical approaches known as predictive (e.g., the Waterfall approach) and lean approaches as reported in Veretennikova and Vaskiv (2018) or agile approaches which are also called adaptive approaches (e.g., the Kanban approach (Lei et al., 2017)). This second family of approaches not only allows to plan and manage projects, but also to make teamwork the most effective.
The 14th study reported in (“14th-annual-state-of-agile-report”, 2020) shows the value of adopting agile methodologies in projects’ development. This study has shown the importance and the advantages of these methodologies over traditional ones as they allow to better manage changing priorities and risks and deliver quality products and products’ releases on a regular basis and on time. These methods are also User-centric as they encourage end users’ and clients’ participation throughout all the project’s development processes. This leads development teams to be more efficient and to more satisfy clients’ needs. Finally, they allow flexible adaptation and agility to handle in time the changing and emerging needs of the client.
Several existing methods fall under the category of agile methods (Ozkan et al., 2020). Scrum is one example which additionally is considered as the most popular and used agile methodology with 58% of people adopting (“14th-annual-state-of-agile-report”, 2020).
However, it seems that it is difficult to integrate and implement for many interrelated reasons. First, for many well and early established enterprises, teams working on project management are mainly used to traditional methods such as waterfall or Spiral. They therefore have difficulties to adopt and learn to use agile methods (Chan & Thong, 2009). Second, the resistance of those teams to change, the spread culture that is in contradiction with agile values, the lack of discipline and agile mindset, the lack of skills /experience with agile methods and finally the omnipresence of traditional development methods and their related tools do not favor implementation of agile ones. In situations where clients suggest instant reactivity and agility to changes, risks related to the non-adoption of agile methods and which result in neither delivering the product on time nor considering at the same time clients’ needs change, becomes even more important. All these reasons require finding out different ways to better engage and motivate team members to embrace its use and hence learn and gain in agile skills such as problem solving, adaptability and reactivity to changes, capacity to negotiate and propose value added user stories and finally interpersonal, leadership and communication skills (Hidayati et al., 2020).
One such a way can be through serious games or gamification of Agile activities and principles (Stettina, et al., 2018) and (Ahmadi et al., 2016). Indeed, in the one hand, serious games are considered as a category of games that engage and motivate users and contribute to achieve prior defined objectives thanks to the game concept they introduce and their positive impact on people and teams (Susi et al., 2007), (Schuller et al., 2013), (Tanenbaum et al., 2013) and (Rumeser & Emsley, 2019).