A Gamified Tool for Motivating Developers to Remove Warnings of Bug Pattern Tools

Abstract

Static analysis tools such as bug pattern tools are useful to detect bugs early in software development. However, existing tools sometimes yield so many warnings that developers tend to ignore such warnings. To deal with this problem, we propose a gamified tool for motivating developers to remove such warnings. Our tool employs the gamification technique that calculates points by counting removed warnings with respect to each developer and each team. The points give developers feedback and urge them to compete with each other. We confirmed that developers removed about 150% warnings with our tool in comparison with the case where they did not use our tool through an experiment.