We'll Fix It in Post: What Do Bug Fixes in Video Game Update Notes Tell Us?
Andrew Truelove, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Iftekhar Ahmed

TL;DR
This study analyzes bug fix notes from 30 popular Steam games to understand bug types, recurrence, severity, and developer perceptions, aiming to improve game testing and bug prevention strategies.
Contribution
It introduces a bug taxonomy for games, analyzes a large dataset of bug fixes, and surveys developers to link bug types with development challenges and recurrence.
Findings
Information bugs are most frequent in updates.
Crash bugs recur most often and are deemed more severe.
Testing challenges and code quality issues are linked to bug persistence.
Abstract
Bugs that persist into releases of video games can have negative impacts on both developers and users, but particular aspects of testing in game development can lead to difficulties in effectively catching these missed bugs. It has become common practice for developers to apply updates to games in order to fix missed bugs. These updates are often accompanied by notes that describe the changes to the game included in the update. However, some bugs reappear even after an update attempts to fix them. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy for bug types in games that is based on prior work. We examine 12,122 bug fixes from 723 updates for 30 popular games on the Steam platform. We label the bug fixes included in these updates to identify the frequency of these different bug types, the rate at which bug types recur over multiple updates, and which bug types are treated as more severe.…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques · Software Testing and Debugging Techniques
