How Is Video Game Development Different from Software Development in Open Source?

2018 IEEE/ACM 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) Pub Date : 2018-05-28 DOI:10.1145/3196398.3196418

L. Pascarella, Fabio Palomba, M. D. Penta, Alberto Bacchelli

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引用次数: 50

Abstract

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.

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电子游戏开发与开源软件开发有何不同?

最近的研究证明，在工业环境中，开发电子游戏与开发其他领域的软件系统(如办公套件和系统实用程序)是不同的。在本文中，我们考虑了开放源代码系统(OSS)背景下的电子游戏开发。具体来说，我们调查了开发者是如何通过制作不同类型的工件来为电子游戏和非游戏做出贡献，他们如何处理故障，以及他们如何看待项目的开发过程。为此，我们对60个OSS项目进行了混合的、定性的和定量的研究。我们的研究结果证实了游戏开发与非游戏开发之间存在显著差异，即项目资源的组织方式以及开发者专业的多样性。此外，回应我们调查的游戏开发者在重用代码和执行自动化测试时比其他开发者感到更困难，他们缺乏对系统需求的清晰概述。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

2018 IEEE/ACM 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)

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