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What do game developers test in their products?

Published: 18 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Context: Software projects often have four objectives; to produce the required functionality, in budget and in schedule, with acceptable quality. That statement may be true for most of the ordinary software development projects, but are these objectives enough for game development, where creativity and artistic aspects have a major role? Goal: We analyze how game developing organizations test their products, what are their main test objectives and how they perceive themselves in the software business. Method: We interviewed seven game development teams from different companies and studied how they test their products with grounded theory approach. Results: Our results suggest that game developers focus on soft values such as game content or user experience, instead of more traditional objectives such as reliability or efficiency. Conclusions: Game developers have similar, but not fully comparable to software industry, set of priorities in their software testing and quality assurance approaches.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ESEM '14: Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
September 2014
461 pages
ISBN:9781450327749
DOI:10.1145/2652524
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 September 2014

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Author Tags

  1. empirical study
  2. game development
  3. test methods
  4. test process

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  • Research-article

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  • European Union Regional Development Fund

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ESEM '14
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ESEM '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 23 of 123 submissions, 19%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 130 of 594 submissions, 22%

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  • (2024)Exploratory testing for platform video games: strategies and lessons learnedJournal on Interactive Systems10.5753/jis.2024.415615:1(657-669)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Breaking Barriers in Mobile Game DevelopmentProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36770618:CHI PLAY(1-20)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
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