Software development companies are in constant change in most cases seeking continuous improvement. Therefore, these companies undertake software process improvement initiatives frequently complex because such initiatives tend to force change in the behavior of the professionals involved. Change management is a process that supports decreasing that complexity facilitating change in people behavior, necessary for success in improvement initiatives. In this context, gamification is a widely used strategy that offers advantages to fight this complexity. This paper uses a method based on experts’ judgment to identify, and analyze gamification principles and software process improvement change resistance causes to establish a relationship between them. Such a relationship facilitates the gamification principles selection for designing change resistance strategies. A set of recommendations related to the established relationship is the main result of this paper. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.