research-article

Detecting Video Game-Specific Bad Smells in Unity Projects

Authors:

Antonio Borrelli,

Vittoria Nardone,

Giuseppe A. Di Lucca,

Gerardo Canfora,

Massimiliano Di PentaAuthors Info & Claims

MSR '20: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Pages 198 - 208

https://doi.org/10.1145/3379597.3387454

Published: 18 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The growth of the video game market, the large proportion of games targeting mobile devices or streaming services, and the increasing complexity of video games trigger the availability of video game-specific tools to assess performance and maintainability problems. This paper proposes UnityLinter, a static analysis tool that supports Unity video game developers to detect seven types of bad smells we have identified as relevant in video game development. Such smell types pertain to performance, maintainability and incorrect behavior problems. After having defined the smells by analyzing the existing literature and discussion forums, we have assessed their relevance with a survey involving 68 participants. Then, we have analyzed the occurrence of the studied smells in 100 open-source Unity projects, and also assessed UnityLinter's accuracy. Results of our empirical investigation indicate that developers well-received performance- and behavior-related issues, while some maintainability issues are more controversial. UnityLinter is, in general, accurate enough in detecting smells (86%-100% precision and 50%-100% recall), and our study shows that the studied smell types occur in 39%-97% of the analyzed projects.

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Cited By

Chen MSmith G(2024)Game Development as Project-Based Learning: Synthesizing Postmortems of Student-Created Mobile GamesProceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3649921.3649999(1-11)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649921.3649999
Ahmad MGeewax JMacvean AKarger DMa KRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey MAniche MNagappan N(2024)API Governance at ScaleProceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice10.1145/3639477.3639713(430-440)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639477.3639713
Abidi MRahman MOpenja MKhomh F(2024)Design smells in multi-language systems and bug-proneness: a survival analysisEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10476-229:5Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10476-2
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Index Terms

Detecting Video Game-Specific Bad Smells in Unity Projects
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Development frameworks and environments
      1. Application specific development environments

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cover image ACM Conferences

MSR '20: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

June 2020

675 pages

ISBN:9781450375177

DOI:10.1145/3379597

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

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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Published: 18 September 2020

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Cited By

Chen MSmith G(2024)Game Development as Project-Based Learning: Synthesizing Postmortems of Student-Created Mobile GamesProceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3649921.3649999(1-11)Online publication date: 21-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3649921.3649999
Ahmad MGeewax JMacvean AKarger DMa KRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey MAniche MNagappan N(2024)API Governance at ScaleProceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice10.1145/3639477.3639713(430-440)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639477.3639713
Abidi MRahman MOpenja MKhomh F(2024)Design smells in multi-language systems and bug-proneness: a survival analysisEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10476-229:5Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10476-2
Nardone VMuse BAbidi MKhomh FDi Penta M(2023)Video Game Bad Smells: What They Are and How Developers Perceive ThemACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/356321432:4(1-35)Online publication date: 26-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563214
Mashiach TSotto-Mayor BKaminka GKalech M(2023)CLEAN++: Code Smells Extraction for C++2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00066(441-445)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00066
Nikeghbal NHossein Kargaran AHeydarnoori ASchütze H(2023)GIRT-Data: Sampling GitHub Issue Report Templates2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00026(104-108)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00026
Bosco MCavoto PUngolo AMuse BKhomh FNardone VDi Penta M(2023)UnityLint: A Bad Smell Detector for Unity2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00033(186-190)Online publication date: May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00033
Agrahari VShanbhag SChimalakonda SRao A(2023)A catalogue of game-specific anti-patterns based on GitHub and Game Development Stack ExchangeJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2023.111789204(111789)Online publication date: Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111789
Francisco da Matta Vegi LValente M(2023)Understanding code smells in Elixir functional languageEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10343-628:4Online publication date: 7-Jul-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-023-10343-6
Qin XHassan F(2022)DyTRec: A Dynamic Testing Recommendation tool for Unity-based Virtual Reality SoftwareProceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering10.1145/3551349.3560510(1-5)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3551349.3560510
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