Software testing is an essential knowledge area required by industry for software engineers. However, software engineering students often consider testing less appealing than designing or coding. Consequently, it is difficult to engage students to create effective tests. To encourage students, we explored the use of gamification and investigated whether this technique can help to improve the engagement and performance of software testing students. We conducted a controlled experiment to compare the engagement and performance of two groups of students that took an undergraduate software testing course in different academic years. The experimental group is formed by 135 students from the gamified course whereas the control group is formed by 100 students from the non-gamified course. The data collected were statistically analyzed to answer the research questions of this study. The results show that the students that participated in the gamification experience were more engaged and achieved a better performance. As an additional finding, the analysis of the results reveals that a key aspect to succeed is the gamification experience design. It is important to distribute the motivating stimulus provided by the gamification throughout the whole experience to engage students until the end. Given these results, we plan to readjust the gamification experience design to increase student engagement in the last stage of the experience, as well as to conduct a longitudinal study to evaluate the effects of gamification.

翻译：软件测试是业界对软件工程师所需的核心知识领域。然而，软件工程专业的学生往往认为测试不如设计或编码具有吸引力。因此，很难激励学生创建有效的测试用例。为鼓励学生，我们探索了游戏化的应用，并研究了该技术是否有助于提升软件测试学生的参与度与表现。我们开展了一项对照实验，比较了不同学年修读本科软件测试课程的两组学生的参与度与表现。实验组由来自游戏化课程的135名学生组成，对照组则由来自非游戏化课程的100名学生组成。我们对收集的数据进行了统计分析，以回答本研究提出的研究问题。结果表明，参与游戏化体验的学生参与度更高，表现也更出色。作为额外发现，结果分析揭示了成功的关键因素在于游戏化体验的设计。必须将游戏化提供的激励刺激贯穿整个体验过程，以保持学生直至结束的参与度。基于这些结果，我们计划重新调整游戏化体验设计，以提升学生在体验最后阶段的学习投入，并开展纵向研究评估游戏化的长期效果。