Survival of the Tested: Gamified Unit Testing Inspired by Battle Royale

While testing takes on a fundamental role to verify software quality and correctness, it often results to be overlooked in the educational field and students often approach it unwillingly, due to its repetitiveness. Our aim is to exploit gamification to engage students by providing them with dynamics like competition, self-expression, and personal improvement. We designed and developed Unit Brawl, a gamified application meant to manage multiple rounds, each one consisting of students developing Java programs and unit tests to be executed on each other. The players collect points by writing correct code that does not make the other players’ test cases fail, or by writing test cases capable of detecting defects in the other players’ code. The results of a preliminary evaluation to assess the functionality and performance of Unit Brawl look promising. They make us confident about its stability, so we plan an evaluation with students in order to verify the effectiveness of the applied game elements in enhancing the students’ interest towards testing topics and their learning.