Acceptance Requirements and Their Gamification Solutions

We live in the days of social software where socialinteractions, from simple notifications to complex business processes, are supported by software platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. But for any social software to be successful, it must beused by a sizeable portion of its intended user community. Usagerequirements are usually referred to as Acceptance Requirementsand they have been studied in the literature both for generaltechnology as well as software. Operationalization techniquesfor such requirements often consist of making a game out ofsoftware usage where users are rewarded/penalized depending onthe degree of their participation. The game may be competitive ornon-competitive, depending on the anticipated personality traitsof intended users. Making a game out of usage is often referredto as Gamification, and gamification has attracted huge attentionin the literature for the past few years because it offers a novelapproach to software technology usage. This paper proposes a generic framework for designinggamified solutions for acceptance requirements. The frameworkconsists of a generic acceptance goal model that characterizes theproblem space by capturing possible refinements for acceptance requirements, and a generic gamification model that capturespossible gamified operationalizations of acceptance requirements. These models have been extracted from the literature and theyare highly dependent on context (cognitive and social) elementsof the intended user community. The proposed framework isillustrated with the Meeting Scheduler exemplar.