Motivation as a Supplementary Requirement

Motivation is a well established topic in psychology and other disciplines such as business management, education, and health care. Despite the di↵erences in defining motivation, see [4], motivation is widely seen as the“psychological processes that cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of behaviour” [6]. A motive can be described as the substance that can increase the will of a person to perform a particular behaviour. Motivation is a requirement per se and can also supplement other functional and non-functional requirements such as increasing productivity and the social and mental well-being within workplaces [7]. A correct engineering of motivational mechanisms could eliminate non-productive behaviours and improve group work [1, 3]. Psychologists have proposed di↵erent models and theories to understand and improve motivation in people. Well-known examples include the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs [5] and Herzberg’s two-factor theory [2]. Maslow’s hierarchy specifies levels of needs that should be satisfied to keep one happy. Herzberg categorised influential factors in two groups: motivators and hygiene factors. Presence of motivators (e.g. social recognition) can increase motivation in employees and give positive satisfaction; whereas hygiene factors (e.g. job security) will not lead to motivation, even though a lack of them decreases motivation. In the field of requirements engineering, systems are generally seen as sociotechnical systems (STS) consisting of various inter-dependent social and technical actors. It is important to keep the social actors motivated to play their roles and achieve the requirements allocated to them and enhance their e ciency and also work experience. Such motivation could be also facilitated via software. Gamification is a term which generally denotes software-based motivation solutions. While motivation involves a wide range of physical and psychological needs, software-based motivation is mostly able to aid in fulfilling a subset of psychological needs. From the perspective of Maslow’s hierarchy and Herzberg’s two-factor theory, software-based solutions create environments that can influence motivator factors and a↵ect hygiene factors. For instance, providing a leader-board can fulfil one’s need for social recognition, which is a motivator. We advocate that two macro types of information should be captured when applying motivation in an STS. The first relates to the motive being designed, i.e. a rewarding system. This includes descriptors of rewards, the means to achieve them, the data being collected and how they are stored to enable, amongst other things, inferring those rewards. The second relates to the STS itself. This includes the task to which motivation is being applied, the roles of the users involved in the reward, and the management style.