kayali, şahin cankaya university - engineering faculty - computer engineering department, Ankara, turkey , yilmaz, murat cankaya university - engineering faculty - computer engineering department, Ankara, Turkey

An Exploratory Study to Assess Analytical and Logical Thinking Skills of the Software Practitioners using a Gamification Perspective

25550

The link between analytical and logical thinking skills and success ofsoftware practitioners attracted an increasing attention in the last decade. Severalstudies report that the ability to think logically is a requirement for improvingsoftware development skills, which exhibits a strong reasoning. Additionally,analytical thinking is a vital part of software development for example whiledividing a task into elemental parts with respect to basic rules and principles. Usingthe basic essence of gamification, this study proposes a mobile testing platform forassessing analytical and logical thinking skills of software practitioners as well ascomputer engineering students. The assessment questions were taken from theliterature and transformed into a gamified tool based on the software requirements.A focus group study was conducted to capture the requirements. Using the Delphimethod, these requirements were discussed by a group of experts to reach amultidisciplinary understanding where a level of moderate agreement has beenachieved. In light of these, an assessment tool was developed, which was tested onboth software practitioners from the industry and senior computer engineeringstudents. Our results suggest that individuals who exhibit skills in analytical andlogical thinking are also more inclined to be successful in software development.

178

Gamification , Software engineering , Software design issues , Delphi study , Analytical thinking ability , Logical thinking ability

Journal Of Natural an‎d Applied Sciences

189