Gamifying the paperwork: dissertation tests a game inside the Jira of a CMMI Level 5 software factory
On October 19, 2026, Bruno Mello Andrade defends at PPCA/UnB a dissertation that embeds ten gamification techniques into the Jira and Confluence of a CMMI Level 5 software factory and measures, over twelve months, what changes in project governance.
Brasília, September 20, 2026
In a software factory certified at CMMI-DEV Level 5, the process is part of the product: every sprint carries rituals of planning, backlog grooming, quality control and audit. The side effect is well known — governance becomes a burden — and the contract governing the operation rules out offsetting that burden with financial incentives. That is precisely where the dissertation Bruno Mello Andrade defends on October 19, 2026, at 10 a.m. comes in, in Module 14 of ICC Centro (basement), Darcy Ribeiro Campus, at the University of Brasília’s Graduate Program in Applied Computing, advised by Prof. Dr. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas .
The bet is not to hand out points and badges, but to diagnose before designing. The Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) profiles the motivation of 12 professionals in leadership roles, that diagnosis prioritizes the Core Drives of the Octalysis framework, and only then are ten game techniques chosen. Deployment is just as deliberate: no new platform. The mechanics were embedded in the Jira and Confluence the team already used, with rules to discard bulk edits and artificial reopenings.
The test is a twelve-month industrial case study: 54 sprints, 22 of historical baseline and 32 of gamified pilot. The operational indicators barely move — throughput from 39.45 to 42.28 tasks per sprint (+7.16%), delayed demands from 11.75% to 9.98%, defect density flat at 4.4%. The significant shift lies elsewhere: the IMI Pressure/Tension item drops from 2.83 to 1.92.
The finding is more interesting than gamification’s usual promise — the measurable gain was removing weight, not piling on motivation — and it comes with caution: without a concurrent control group, the work speaks of association, not causation. It also records an exploratory pattern it names behavioral asymmetry: adherence to mandatory routines arrives well ahead of adherence to voluntary ones. By crossing Gamification with software quality at the leadership layer — rather than the development layer, where the literature concentrates — the dissertation occupies sparsely documented ground.
The committee will be chaired by the advisor, Prof. Dr. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas (FCTE/UnB), and composed of Prof. Dr. George Marsicano Corrêa (FCTE/UnB) and Prof. Dr. Paulo Miguel Torres Duarte Quaresma (University of Évora). Part of the results has already circulated as a paper: Adaptive Gamification as a Software Process Analytics Instrument, by Andrade and Freitas, at QUATIC 2026 in Genoa.
The full abstract is on the defense page ; the full text — written in Portuguese — will go to the UnB Institutional Repository after deposit.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.