Gamification is an established practice in Software Engineering to increase effectiveness and engagement in many practices. This manuscript provides a characterization of the application of gamification to the Software Testing area. Such practice in fact reportedly suffers from low engagement by both personnel in industrial contexts and learners in educational contexts. Our goal is to identify the application areas and utilized gamified techniques and mechanics, the provided benefits and drawbacks, as well as the open challenges in the field. To this purpose, we conducted a Multivocal Literature Review to identify white and grey literature sources addressing gamified software testing.

We analyzed 73 contributions and summarized the most common gamified mechanics, concepts, tools, and domains where they are mostly applied. We conclude that gamification in software testing is mostly applied to the test creation phase with simple white-box unit or mutation testing tools and is mostly used to foster good behaviors by promoting the testers’ accomplishment. Key research areas and main challenges in the field are: careful design of tailored gamified mechanics for specific testing techniques; the need for technological improvements to enable crowdsourcing, cooperation, and concurrency; the necessity for empirical and large-scale evaluation of the benefits delivered by gamification mechanics.

游戏化是软件工程中的一种既定实践，可以提高许多实践的有效性和参与度。本手稿描述了游戏化在软件测试领域的应用。据报道，这种做法实际上受到工业环境中的人员和教育环境中的学习者的参与度较低的影响。我们的目标是确定应用领域并利用游戏化技术和机制、所提供的优点和缺点以及该领域的开放挑战。为此，我们进行了多语言文献综述，以确定解决游戏化软件测试问题的白色和灰色文献来源。

我们分析了 73 项贡献，并总结了最常见的游戏化机制、概念、工具以及它们最常应用的领域。我们的结论是，软件测试中的游戏化主要应用于使用简单的白盒单元或突变测试工具的测试创建阶段，并且主要用于通过提升测试人员的成就来培养良好的行为。该领域的关键研究领域和主要挑战是：针对特定测试技术精心设计定制的游戏化机制；需要改进技术以实现众包、合作和并发；对游戏化机制带来的好处进行实证和大规模评估的必要性。