TY - GEN
T1 - How Is Video Game Development Different from Software Development in Open Source?
AU - Pascarella, Luca
AU - Palomba, Fabio
AU - Di Penta, Massimiliano
AU - Bacchelli, Alberto
N1 - Acknowledgments: European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 642954
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Recent research has provided evidence that, in the industrial context, developing video games diverges from developing software systems in other domains, such as office suites and system utilities. In this paper, we consider video game development in the open source system (OSS) context. Specifically, we investigate how developers contribute to video games vs. non-games by working on different kinds of artifacts, how they handle malfunctions, and how they perceive the development process of their projects. To this purpose, we conducted a mixed, qualitative and quantitative study on a broad suite of 60 OSS projects. Our results confirm the existence of significant differences between game and non-game development, in terms of how project resources are organized and in the diversity of developers’ specializations. Moreover, game developers responding to our survey perceive more difficulties than other developers when reusing code as well as performing automated testing, and they lack a clear overview of their system’s requirements.
AB - Recent research has provided evidence that, in the industrial context, developing video games diverges from developing software systems in other domains, such as office suites and system utilities. In this paper, we consider video game development in the open source system (OSS) context. Specifically, we investigate how developers contribute to video games vs. non-games by working on different kinds of artifacts, how they handle malfunctions, and how they perceive the development process of their projects. To this purpose, we conducted a mixed, qualitative and quantitative study on a broad suite of 60 OSS projects. Our results confirm the existence of significant differences between game and non-game development, in terms of how project resources are organized and in the diversity of developers’ specializations. Moreover, game developers responding to our survey perceive more difficulties than other developers when reusing code as well as performing automated testing, and they lack a clear overview of their system’s requirements.
U2 - 10.1145/3196398.3196418
DO - 10.1145/3196398.3196418
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 978-1-4503-5716-6
SP - 392
EP - 402
BT - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR. ACM, New York, NY
ER -