Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Computer games industry (CG) is an essential part of the software industry. Games are a multi-billionaire market, adding CD$ 3.7 billion to Canada's GDP annually, supporting more than 40,000 jobs [2]. However, the software engineering (SE) community rarely studies computer games, and there is a lack of research about CG because there is a vision CG is more art than engineering. My research program contributes to the development of software engineering for computer games (SEGA) by concentrating on modelling, testing, and experimentation. The long-term objective of this program is the formulation of empirical models and approaches to address the lacks of CG engineering. Its activities will produce contributions that widen theoretical knowledge of CG engineering while being also motivated by considerations of use. On the short-term, the present proposal aims at training two doctoral students and four master students and is divided into three objectives as follows. 1. Build models and new techniques for computer game testing. The first objective focuses on applying automatic transformations (e.g., test amplification) in the context of DevOps and targets the early detection of regression bugs. Further, using machine learning techniques (reinforcement learning), this objective shall investigate new approaches to automatically generate and test large numbers of system configurations in CG projects to reduce the costs of manual testing. 2. Build models and new techniques for computer game debugging. Together with testing, debugging is an essential process to find faults. Previous results have discussed crowd approaches to address debugging challenges in software development. Thus, the second objective focuses on investigating debugging for computer games. Thus, the effort to debug computer games using a collaborative approach (as Swarm Debugging) is a research opportunity to explore. 3. Build empirical theories and quality models for computer games. A deep comprehension on testing and debugging phenomena for game computers opens an opportunity to explore new theories and quality models fro CG. Thus, this objective focuses on researching in close cooperation with CG industry (like Ubisoft), applying in the following areas: (1) human factors in SEGA; (2) data-driven and machine learning SE to improve software quality practices in computer games; (3) build software quality models to support CG issues. Accordingly, my program contributes to advancing of quality and reducing maintenance costs to computer games industry.