Fabio Petrillo

École de Technologie Supérieure

Despite its growth and profitability, many reports about game projects show that their production is not a simple task, but one beset by common problems and still distant from having a healthy and synergetic work process. The goal of this article is to survey the problems in the development process of electronic games, which are mainly collected fr...

This paper presents a survey of problems found in the development process of electronic games. These problems were collected mainly from game postmortems and specialized litterature on game development, allowing a comparison with respect to well-known problems in the traditional software industry.

Game development is a very complex and multidisciplinary activity and surely the success of games as one of most profitable areas in entertainment domain could not be incidentally. The goal of this paper is to investigate if (and how) principles and practices from Agile Methods have been adopted in game development, mainly gathering evidences throu...

Likert scale data correspond to data collected from questionnaires, where there are several statements about a fact, situation, design or technique, and the respondents must specify their level of agreement with each statement by marking one of several ordered alternatives. Often, five choices are posed to respondents (strongly agree, agree, neithe...

As the technology evolves, the existence of different computational devices has made ad-hoc software development no longer acceptable in the development of multi-platform software applications. This article presents UsiXML4ALL, a software tool developed to facilitate the creation/adaptation of multiplatform applications. UsiXML4LL acts as a rendere...

Industrial robotic systems (IRS) consist of industrial robots that automate industrial processes. They accurately perform repetitive tasks, replacing or assisting with dangerous jobs like assembly in the automotive and chemical industries. Failures in these systems can be catastrophic, so it is important to ensure their quality and safety before us...

Game engines are tools to facilitate video game development. They provide graphics, sound, and physics simulation features, which would have to be otherwise implemented by developers. Even though essential for modern commercial video game development, game engines are complex and developers often struggle to understand their architecture, leading t...

Context: The constant growth of primary evidence and Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) publications in the Software Engineering (SE) field leads to the need for SLR Updates. However, searching and selecting evidence for SLR updates demands significant effort from SE researchers. Objective: We present emerging results on an automated approach to...

Game engines support video game development by providing functionalities such as graphics rendering or input/output device management. However, their architectures are often overlooked, which hinders their integration and extension. In this paper, we use an approach for architecture recovery to create architectural models for 10 open-source game en...

The concept behind IoT is as powerful as it is complex, and for the entities and modules in the IoT solution to mesh together perfectly, they all must be part of a well-thought-out structure. That is where accomplishing a deep understanding, IoT architecture becomes paramount given the complexity of IoT domains and platforms. In this paper, we pres...

As the complexity and scope of games increase, game testing, also called playtesting, becomes an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of game testing leaves space for automation. In this paper, we research, design, and implement an approach to supplement game testing to balance video games with aut...

Game engines provide video game developers with a wide range of fundamental subsystems for creating games, such as 2D/3D graphics rendering, input device management, and audio playback. Developers often integrate these subsystems with other applications or extend them via plugins. To integrate or extend correctly, developers need a broad system arc...

Distributed Machine Learning refers to the practice of training a model on multiple computers or devices that can be called nodes. Additionally, serverless computing is a new paradigm for cloud computing that uses functions as a computational unit. Serverless computing can be effective for distributed learning systems by enabling automated resource...

Video game developers use game engines as a tool to manage complex aspects of game development. While engines play a big role in the success of games, to the best of our knowledge, they are often developed in isolation, in a closed-source manner, without architectural discussions, comparison, and collaboration among projects. In this work in progre...

System architecture diagrams play an essential role in understanding system architecture. They encourage more active discussion among participants and make it easier to recall system details. However, system architecture diagrams often diverge from the software. As a result, they can interfere with the understanding and maintenance of the software....

Context: New scientific evidence continuously arises with advances in Software Engineering (SE) research. Conventionally , Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are not updated or updated intermittently, leaving gaps between updates, during which time the SLR may be missing crucial new evidence. Goal: We propose and evaluate a concept and process ca...

Video game developers use game engines as a tool to manage complex aspects of game development. While engines play a big role in the success of games, to the best of our knowledge, they are often developed in isolation, in a closed-source manner, without architectural discussions, comparison, and collaboration among projects. In this work in progre...

Context: New scientific evidence continuously arises with advances in Software Engineering (SE) research. Conventionally, Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) are not updated or updated intermittently, leaving gaps between updates, during which time the SLR may be missing crucial new evidence. Goal: We propose and evaluate a concept and process cal...

The first edition of the workshop on Automated Software Engineering For Games (ASE4Games 2021) was held virtually on November 14th, 2021, co-located with the 36v IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2021). Five papers from all over the world were submitted, two full-papers and two short-papers were accepted. The...

As the complexity and scope of game development increases, playtesting remains an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of playtesting gives space to improvements in the process. In this paper, we investigate gaps between academic solutions in the literature for automated video game testing and the...

Project Management anti-patterns are well-documented in the software-engineering literature, and studying them allows understanding their impacts on teams and projects. The video game development industry is known for its mismanagement practices, and therefore applying this knowledge would help improving game developers' productivity and well-being...

Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) is an approach to managing the entire lifecycle of a machine learning model. It has evolved over the last years and has started attracting many people in research and businesses in the industry. It supports the development of machine learning (ML) pipelines typical in the phases of data collection, data pre-proce...

Context: Logs are often the primary source of information for system developers and operations engineers to understand and diagnose the behavior of a software system in production. In many cases, logs are the only evidence available for fault investigation. Problem: However, the inappropriate choice of log severity level can impact the amount of lo...

Debugging is a relevant task for finding bugs during software development, maintenance, and evolution. During debugging, developers use modern IDE debuggers to analyze variables, step execution, and set breakpoints. Observing IDE debuggers, we find several breakpoint types. However, what are the breakpoint types? The goal of our study is to map the...

Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) play an important role in the Evidence-Based Software Engineering scenario. With the advance of the computer science field and the growth of research publications, new evidence continuously arises. This fact impacts directly on the purpose of keeping SLRs up-to-date which could lead researchers to obsolete concl...

As software systems become more complex, modern software development requires more attention to human perspectives, and active participation of development teams in requirements elicitation tasks. In this context, incomplete or ambiguous requirements descriptions do not guide the development of good software products. We hypothesize that the text a...

Context: Logging tasks track the system's functioning by keeping records of evidence that have been analyzed by monitoring and observability activities. For these activities to be effective, it is necessary to consider the quality of the consumed information. Problem: However, the presence of noise - unwanted information - compromises the log files...

As the video game market grows larger, it becomes harder to stand out from the crowd. Launching a successful game involves different aspects. But what are they? In this paper, we investigate some aspects of the high-rated games from a dataset of 200 projects. The results show that the none of the aspects of this study have a strong relationship wit...

Communication between practitioners is essential for the system's quality in the DevOps context. To improve this communication, practitioners often use informal diagrams to represent the components of a system. However, as systems evolve, it is a challenge to synchronize diagrams with production environments consistently. Hence, the inconsistency o...

Industrial robots are important machines applied in numerous modern industries that execute repetitive tasks with high accuracy, replacing or supporting dangerous jobs. In this kind of system, with increased complexity in which cost is related to the time the system keeps working, the system must operate with a minimum number of failures. In other...

Communication between practitioners is essential for the system's quality in the DevOps context. To improve this communication, practitioners often use informal diagrams to represent the components of a system. However, as systems evolve, it is a challenge to synchronize diagrams with production environments consistently. Hence, the inconsistency o...

Security logs are widely used to monitor data, networks, and computer activities. By analyzing them, security experts can pick out anomalies that reveal the presence of cyber attacks or information leaks and stop them quickly before serious damage occurs. This paper presents a systematic literature review on the use of security logs for data leak d...

Video-game projects are notorious for having day-one bugs, no matter how big their budget or team size. The quality of a game is essential for its success. This quality could be assessed and ensured through testing. However, to the best of our knowledge, little is known about video-game testing. In this paper, we want to understand how game develop...

Robots are being applied in a vast range of fields, leading researchers and practitioners to write tasks more complex than in the past. The robot software complexity increases the difficulty of engineering the robot's software components with quality requirements. Researchers and practitioners have applied software engineering (SE) approaches and r...

Context Given its competitiveness, the video-game industry has a closed-source culture. Hence, little is known about the problems faced by game developers. However, game developers do share information about their game projects through postmortems, which describe informally what happened during the projects. Objective The software-engineering rese...

Game engines help developers create video games and avoid duplication of code and effort, like frameworks for traditional software systems. In this paper, we explore open-source game engines along three perspectives: literature, code, and human. First, we explore and summarize the academic literature on game engines. Second, we compare the characte...

Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which t...

Context: There is a growing demand for information on how IT companies look for candidates to their open positions. Objective: This paper investigates which hard and soft skills are more required in IT companies by analyzing the description of 20,000 job opportunities. Method: We applied open card sorting to perform a high-level analysis on which t...

Context: Several studies investigated the impact of anti-patterns (i.e., "poor" solutions to recurring design problems) during maintenance activities and reported that anti-patterns significantly affect the developers' effort required to edit files. However, before developers edit files, they must understand the source code of the systems. This sou...

In the past 10 years, several researches studied video game development process who proposed approaches to improve the way how games are developed. These approaches usually adopt agile methodologies because of claims that traditional practices and the waterfall process are gone. However, are the "old days" really gone in the game industry? In this...

Context: Little is known of the problems faced by game developers. However, game developers do share information about their games projects through postmortems, which describe informally what happened during the projects. Objective: The software-engineering research community and game developers would benefit from a state of the problems of video g...

Communication between practitioners is essential for product quality in the DevOps context. This communication often takes place through deployment diagrams of a system under development. However, it is common diagrams to become ambiguous or inconsistent as the system progresses and goes to a continuous delivery pipeline or production. Moreover, di...

Open Source Software (OSS) has been recognized by the software development community as an effective way to deliver software. Unlike traditional software development, OSS development is driven by collaboration among developers spread geographically and motivated by common goals and interests. Besides this fact, it is recognized by OSS community the...

In Software Engineering, some of the most critical activities are maintenance and evolution. However, to perform both with quality, minimizing impacts and risks, developers need to analyze and identify where the main problems come from previously. In this paper, we introduce DR-Tools Suite, a set of lightweight open-source tools that analyze and ca...

Context: Android operating system always brings new releases and updates to improve security, increase performance and bring a better user experience. When Google announces a new release, a whole chain of changes is triggered in cascade, causing many compatibility issues. Objective: This study focus at performing a quantitative and qualitative anal...

Android operating system introduces new releases frequently. This fact led to the existence of several Android Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which is one of the causes of the Android fragmentation phenomenon. As a consequence of fragmentation, many apps became not ready for new Android releases. Aiming at investigation of the readiness...

Over the past two decades, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become an underlying concept to a variety of solutions and technologies that it is now hardly possible to enumerate and describe all of them. The concept behind the Internet of Things is as powerful as it is complex, and for the components in the IoT solution tomesh together perfectly, the...

Refactoring and smells have been well researched by the software-engineering research community these past decades. Several secondary studies have been published on code smells, discussing their implications on software quality,their impact on maintenance and evolution, and existing tools for their detection. Other secondary studies addressed refa...