Designing a Serious Game: Teaching Developers to Embed Privacy into Software Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a serious game framework designed to educate software developers on embedding privacy practices into their coding, aiming to improve privacy-preserving software development through engaging, motivational learning tools.

Contribution

It presents a novel game design framework as an educational intervention to enhance developers' privacy coding behavior, bridging the gap between privacy guidelines and practical implementation.

Findings

Framework incorporated into a gaming scenario to motivate developers

Potential to improve privacy-preserving coding practices

Supports adoption of privacy engineering methodologies

Abstract

Software applications continue to challenge user privacy when users interact with them. Privacy practices (e.g. Data Minimisation (DM), Privacy by Design (PbD) or General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)) and related "privacy engineering" methodologies exist and provide clear instructions for developers to implement privacy into software systems they develop that preserve user privacy. However, those practices and methodologies are not yet a common practice in the software development community. There has been no previous research focused on developing "educational" interventions such as serious games to enhance software developers' coding behaviour. Therefore, this research proposes a game design framework as an educational tool for software developers to improve (secure) coding behaviour, so they can develop privacy-preserving software applications that people can use. The elements of the proposed framework were incorporated into a gaming application scenario that enhances the software developers' coding behaviour through their motivation. The proposed work not only enables the development of privacy-preserving software systems but also helping the software development community to put privacy guidelines and engineering methodologies into practice.