5th Workshop on Gamification in Software Development, Verification, and Validation (Gamify2026)

Gamify 2026 will be the fifth edition of the international workshop on Gamification in Software Development, Verification, and Validation. This edition of the workshop will be co-located with EASE 2026 on TBD in Glasgow, United Kingdom.

Gamification is the practice of applying game-like mechanics to increase engagement and fun in non-ludic activities. Gamification usually involves elements such as leaderboards, achievements, missions, and competitions between players. Evidence in Software Engineering literature demonstrates that gamification can improve software quality when applied to most phases of the software process. Gamify aims at investigating the current trends in the development of source code, and in the generation of test scenarios that leverage Gamified mechanics.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners and tool developers working on topics related to the application of such gamified mechanics to software development, verification and validation. The workshop will aim to include both academic and empirical research, as well as presentations of gamified tools and industrial case studies.

Venue

The workshop will be held at the James McCune Smith Building in Glasgow. Co-located with EASE 2026.

Previous Editions

• Gamify 2025 was held the 3rd of May, 2025, in Ottawa (co-located with ICSE 2025).
• Gamify 2024 was held the 14th of September, 2024, in Vienna (co-located with ISSTA 2024).
• Gamify 2023 was held the 4th of December, 2023, online only (virtually co-located with ESEC-FSE 2023).
• Gamify 2022 was held the 17 of November, 2022, in Singapore (co-located with ESEC-FSE 2022).

Highlights

Call for Papers

Authors are invited to submit papers to the workshop, and present and discuss them at the event on topics related to Gamification in Software Development, Verification and Validation. Paper submissions can be of the following types:

• Full papers (max. 10 pages) describing original work in progress research and emerging results aligned with the topics of workshop;
• Position/Short papers (max. 5 pages) discussion of innovative ideas, identification of research opportunities and challenges, and plans for future work (to get quick feedback from the community);

Relevant topic of interest

• Gamified software development;
• Gamified requirement elicitation;
• Gamified definition of test cases/suites;
• Gamified end-2-end, capture & replay or exploratory testing;
• Gamified integrated development environments;
• Theoretical gamification frameworks;
• Metric frameworks to evaluate the performance of software developers and testers;
• Gamification applied to software development and software testing education;
• Applied games for software development and software testing education;
• Empirical evaluation and case studies of applied gamification in the contexts mentioned above.

Paper Submissions

All submissions must be in English and in PDF format. At the time of submission, all papers must conform to the EASE 2026+Format and Submission Guidelines.

Gamify 2026 will employ a single-blind review process. Papers should be submitted through EasyChair.

At least three program committee members will review each paper.

Accepted papers will be published as part of EASE workshop proceedings, through the ACM Digital Library. Submissions must conform to the ACM conference proceedings template, specified in the ACM Formatting Guidelines. When submitting to the workshop the authors acknowledge that they conform to the authorship policy of the IEEE.

At least one author of each accepted paper will need an EASE workshop registration. A single-day workshop registration will be sufficient.