Hi James -

I can certainly see a connection here between NCrunch and gamification. Many people comment on how getting the markers to turn green seems like a game. Most likely this stems from the the fact that NCrunch gives you near immediate positive/negative feedback on success or failure of your coding efforts.

It's quite a refreshing viewpoint to take on a tool like NCrunch. Most of the time people think about testing tools as simply being a way to improve productivity or the reliability of their software, and while this is the goal of NCrunch, it never hurts to make things fun.

IMHO, the true challenge of gamifying coding is to find a way to mechanically encourage people to write better code. The scoring of what is 'better' can, however, be very subjective. Code coverage in itself can be a good example. 100% code coverage is a common goal for many projects - though were I to work on a project with 100% code coverage, I would be asking whether developers were chasing for reliable code or for better metrics. I have worked on project teams where team members were praised or berated based on the metrics of the code they wrote, and in retrospect I can't say I agree that it made the system any better.

This isn't to say that I think gamification of TDD/BDD is a bad idea. Actually, I very much like the idea and would be interested in exploring it. The devil is very much in the detail.