Quang’s paper “An Empirical Study of the Characteristics of Popular Game Jams and Their High-ranking Submissions on itch.io” was accepted for publication at the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2020! Super congrats Quang!

Abstract:
Game jams are hackathon-like events that allow participants to develop a playable game prototype within a time limit. They foster creativity and the exchange of ideas by letting developers with different skill sets collaborate. Having a high-ranking game is a great bonus to a beginning game developer’s résumé and their pursuit of a career in the game industry. However, participants often face time constraints set by jam hosts while balancing what aspects of their games should be emphasized to have the highest chance of winning. Similarly, hosts need to understand what to emphasize when organizing online jams so that their jams are more popular, in terms of submission rate. In this paper, we study 1,290 past game jams and their 3,752 submissions on itch.io to understand better what makes popular jams and high-ranking games perceived well by the audience. We find that a quality description has a positive contribution to both a jam’s popularity and a game’s ranking. Additionally, more manpower organizing a jam or developing a game increases a jam’s popularity and a game’s high-ranking likelihood. High-ranking games tend to support Windows or macOS, and belong to the “Puzzle”, “Platformer”, “Interactive Fiction”, or “Action” genres. Also, shorter competitive jams tend to be more popular. Based on our findings, we suggest jam hosts and participants improve the description of their products and consider co-organizing or co-participating in a jam. Furthermore, jam participants should develop multi-platform multi-genre games. Finally, jam hosts should introduce a tighter time limit to increase their jam’s popularity.

See our Publications for the full paper.

Jiayuan’s paper “Studying the Association between Bountysource Bounties and the Issue-addressing Likelihood of GitHub Issue Reports” was accepted for publication in the EMSE journal! Super congrats Jiayuan!

Abstract:
Due to the voluntary nature of open source software, it can be hard to find a developer to work on a particular task. For
example, some issue reports may be too cumbersome and unexciting for someone to volunteer to do them, yet these issue reports
may be of high priority to the success of a project. To provide an incentive for implementing such issue reports, one can propose a
monetary reward, i.e., a bounty, to the developer who completes that particular task. In this paper, we study bounties in open source
projects on GitHub to better understand how bounties can be leveraged to evolve such projects in terms of addressing issue reports.
We investigated 5,445 bounties for GitHub projects. These bounties were proposed through the Bountysource platform with a total
bounty value of $406,425. We find that 1) in general, the timing of proposing bounties is the most important factor that is associated
with the likelihood of an issue being addressed. More specifically, issue reports are more likely to be addressed if they are for projects
in which bounties are used more frequently and if they are proposed earlier. 2) The bounty value of an issue report is the most
important factor that is associated with the issue-addressing likelihood in the projects in which no bounties were used before. 3) There
is a risk of wasting money for backers who invest money on long-standing issue reports.

See our Publications for the full paper.

Simon’s paper “Microservices: A Performance Tester’s Dream or Nightmare?” was accepted for publication in the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)! Super congrats Simon! This was a joint work with Weiyi Shang (Concordia University), Dušan Okanović and André van Hoorn (University of Stuttgart) from the SPEC RG on DevOps performance.

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a shift in software development towards microservice-based architectures, which consist of small services that focus on one particular functionality. Many companies are migrating their applications to such architectures to reap the benefits of microservices, such as increased flexibility, scalability and a smaller granularity of the offered functionality by a service. On the one hand, the benefits of microservices for functional testing are often praised, as the focus on one functionality and their smaller granularity allow for more targeted and more convenient testing. On the other hand, using microservices has their consequences (both positive and negative) on other types of testing, such as performance testing. Performance testing is traditionally done by establishing the baseline performance of a software version, which is then used to compare the performance testing results of later software versions. However, as we show in this paper, establishing such a baseline performance is challenging in microservice applications. In this paper, we discuss the benefits and challenges of microservices from a performance tester’s point of view. Through a series of experiments on the TeaStore application, we demonstrate how microservices affect the performance testing process, and we demonstrate that it is not straightforward to achieve reliable performance testing results for a microservice application.

You can find the paper on our publications page.

Sara’s paper “A Framework for Satisfying the Performance Requirements of Containerized Software Systems Through Multi-Versioning” was accepted for publication in the International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE)! Super congrats Sara! This was a joint work with Alireza Goli (UAlberta) and Hamzeh Khazaei (York University).

Abstract:
With the increasing popularity and complexity of containerized software systems, satisfying the performance requirements of these systems becomes more challenging as well. While a common remedy to this problem is to increase the allocated amount of resources by scaling up or out, this remedy is not necessarily cost-effective and therefore often problematic for smaller companies. In this paper, we study an alternative, more cost-effective approach for satisfying the performance requirements of containerized software systems. In particular, we investigate how we can satisfy such requirements by applying software multi-versioning to the system’s resource-heavy containers. We present DockerMV, an open source extension of the Docker framework, to support multi-versioning of containerized software systems. We demonstrate the efficacy of multi-versioning for satisfying the performance requirements of containerized software systems through experiments on the TeaStore, a microservice reference test application, and Znn, a containerized news portal. Our DockerMV extension can be used by software developers to introduce multi-versioning in their own containerized software systems, thereby better allowing them to meet the performance requirements of their systems.

See our Publications for the paper.

Daniel’s paper “Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications” was accepted for publication in the EMSE journal! Super congrats Daniel!

Abstract:
Prior work has shown that gamer loyalty is important for the sales of a developer’s future games. Therefore, it is important for game developers to increase the longevity of their games. However, game developers cannot always meet the growing and changing needs of the gaming community, due to the often already overloaded schedules of developers. So-called modders can potentially assist game developers with addressing gamers’ needs. Modders are enthusiasts who provide modifications or completely new content for a game. By supporting modders, game developers can meet the rapidly growing and varying needs of their gamer base. Modders have the potential to play a role in extending the life expectancy of a game, thereby saving game developers time and money, and leading to a better overall gaming experience for their gamer base. In this paper, we empirically study the metadata of 9,521 mods that were extracted from the Nexus Mods distribution platform. The Nexus Mods distribution platform is one of the largest mod distribution platforms for PC games at the time of our study. The goal of our paper is to provide useful insights about mods on the Nexus Mods distribution platform from a quantitative perspective, and to provide researchers a solid foundation to further explore game mods. To better understand the potential of mods to extend the longevity of a game we study their characteristics, and we study their release schedules and post-release support (in terms of bug reports) as a proxy for the willingness of the modding community to contribute to a game. We find that providing official support for mods can be beneficial for the perceived quality of the mods of a game: games for which a modding tool is provided by the original game developer have a higher median endorsement ratio than mods for games that do not have such a tool. In addition, mod users are willing to submit bug reports for a mod. However, they often fail to do this in a systematic manner using the bug reporting tool of the Nexus Mods platform, resulting in low-quality bug reports which are difficult to resolve. Our findings give the first insights into the characteristics, release schedule and post-release support of game mods. Our findings show that some games have a very active modding community, which contributes to those games through mods. Based on our findings, we recommend that game developers who desire an active modding community for their own games provide the modding community with an officially-supported modding tool. In addition, we recommend that mod distribution platforms, such as Nexus Mods, improve their bug reporting system to receive higher quality bug reports.

See our Publications for the full paper.

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