Gamification has been applied in software engineering to improve quality and results by increasing people’s motivation and engagement. A systematic mapping has identified research gaps in the field, one of them being the difficulty of creating an integrated gamified environment comprising all the tools of an organization, since most existing gamified tools are custom developments or prototypes. In this paper, we propose a gamification software architecture that allows us to transform the work environment of a software organization into an integrated gamified environment, i.e., the organization can maintain its tools, and the rewards obtained by the users for their actions in different tools will mount up. We developed a gamification engine based on our proposal, and we carried out a case study in which we applied it in a real software development company. The case study shows that the gamification engine has allowed the company to create a gamified workplace by integrating custom-developed tools and off-the-shelf tools such as Redmine, TestLink, or JUnit, with the gamification engine. Two main advantages can be highlighted: (i) our solution allows the organization to maintain its current tools, and (ii) the rewards for actions in any tool accumulate in a centralized gamified environment.

Global Software Development (GSD) is a well established field of software engineering with the benefits of a global environment. Software Project Management (SPM) plays a key role in the success of GSD. As a result, the need has arisen to study and evaluate the downsides of SPM for GSD, to thereby pave the way for the development of new methods, techniques, and tools with which to tackle them. This paper aims to identify and classify research on SPM approaches for GSD that are available in the literature, to identify their current weaknesses and strengths, and to analyze their applications in industry. We performed a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) based on six classification criteria. Eighty-four papers were selected and analyzed. The results indicate that interest in SPM for GSD has been increasing since 2006. As a class of approaches, the most frequently reported methods (40%) are those used for coordination, planning, and monitoring, along with estimation techniques that can be used to better match a distributed project. SPM for GSD requires further investigation by researchers and practitioners, particularly with respect to cost and time estimations. These findings will help overcome the challenges that must to be considered in future SPM research for GSD, especially regarding collaboration and time-zone differences.