Context : Gamification appears to improve enjoyment and quality of execution of software engineering activities, including software testing. Though commonly employed in industry, manual exploratory testing of web application GUIs was proven to be mundane and expensive. Gamification applied to that kind of testing activity has the potential to overcome its limitations, though no empirical research has explored this area yet. Goal : Collect preliminary insights on how gamification, when performed by novice testers, affects the effectiveness, efficiency, test case realism, and user experience in exploratory testing of web applications. Method : Common gamification features augment an existing exploratory testing tool: Final Score with Leaderboard, Injected Bugs, Progress Bar, and Exploration Highlights. The original tool and the gamified version are then compared in an experiment involving 144 participants. User experience is elicited using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) questionnaire instrument. Results : Statistical analysis identified several significant differences for metrics that represent the effectiveness and efficiency of tests showing an improvement in coverage when they were developed with gamification. Additionally, user experience is improved with gamification. Conclusions : Gamification of exploratory testing has a tangible effect on how testers create test cases for web applications. While the results are mixed, the effects are most beneficial and interesting and warrant more research in the future. Further research shall be aimed at confirming the presented results in the context of state-of-the-art testing tools and real-world development environments.

中文翻译：

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游戏化探索性 GUI 测试的有效性和效率

背景：游戏化似乎可以提高软件工程活动（包括软件测试）执行的乐趣和质量。尽管在工业界普遍采用，但 Web 应用程序 GUI 的手动探索性测试被证明是平凡且昂贵的。应用于此类测试活动的游戏化有可能克服其局限性，尽管尚未有实证研究探索这一领域。目标：收集关于新手测试人员执行游戏化如何影响 Web 应用程序探索性测试中的有效性、效率、测试用例真实性和用户体验的初步见解。方法：常见的游戏化功能增强了现有的探索性测试工具：带有排行榜的最终分数、注入的错误、进度条和探索亮点。然后在一项涉及 144 名参与者的实验中对原始工具和游戏化版本进行了比较。用户体验是使用技术接受模型 (TAM) 问卷工具得出的。结果：统计分析发现了指标的几个显着差异，这些指标代表了测试的有效性和效率，表明通过游戏化开发测试时覆盖率有所提高。此外，游戏化还改善了用户体验。结论：探索性测试的游戏化对测试人员如何为 Web 应用程序创建测试用例产生了切实的影响。虽然结果好坏参半，但其影响是最有益、最有趣的，值得未来进行更多研究。进一步的研究旨在在最先进的测试工具和真实的开发环境中确认所提出的结果。