Gamified Learning Analytics to Enhance the Productivity of Software Practitioners in Agile Requirement Change Management

In the context of technology-enhanced professional learning for software engineering, agile Requirements Change Management (RCM) often suffers from fluctuating motivation and inconsistent collaboration, which reduces practitioners’ learning productivity and task performance in authentic project settings. Although prior studies have investigated gamification and productivity in software development, the literature remains limited in explaining how educational technology and learning analytics can be systematically integrated to support continuous competency development for software practitioners. The study seeks to design and evaluate a gamified learning environment to enhance software practitioners’ productivity, using measurable indicators, and to identify the most influential core motivational drivers. Involving 32 software practitioners from a development unit, the study employed a log-based ABA quasi-experimental design. During the intervention phase, collaborative participation surged by 99.4%, the task completion rate increased by 16.53 percentage points, work duration with keyboard and mouse rose by 40.2%, and task completion time decreased by 50.8%. These differences were statistically significant, as demonstrated by the Friedman test (p < 0.001), with the strongest positive relationships observed for the core drives of unpredictability & curiosity, as well as social influence & relatedness. Theoretically, the findings enrich the literature on technology-supported workplace learning by linking motivational contributions at the Octalysis core-drives level to productivity indicators within the RCM cycle.