Here you can find several examples of ongoing projects in the ASGAARD lab. If you are interested in collaborating on topics related to these projects, or starting new ones, do not hesitate to get in touch!
Automated Quality Assurance of Games
As modern games tend to be complex and have many possible in-game event sequences (i.e., interactions with the main character(s)), creating a high-quality test suite for a game is not trivial and time-consuming. Ideally, the process of creating and executing game test suites can be automated. Unfortunately, automated testing of games is extremely difficult and not often done in practice. In this project, we study how we can improve the state-of-the-art of automated testing of computer games by leveraging data to help better focus automated test generation and execution. This project is a collaboration with Prodigy Education.
Leveraging user feedback on software
Digital distribution platforms (such as Steam or the Google Play store) contain enormous amounts of user feedback. We study how we can extract useful information from these mostly unstructured sources of user feedback. For example, we look at how a mobile app or game is perceived across different platforms, such as the Google Android and Apple iOS platforms. In addition, we study how we can leverage feedback from sources that are even less structured, such as game blogs.
Improving post-release support
Post-release support is essential for maintaining user satisfaction and loyalty. We study how to improve several types of post-release support. For example, we study how responding to user reviews can improve the rating that was given by a user. In addition, we study how the bug reporting and triaging processes for software can be improved. For example, we developed an approach to automatically identify videos that showcase a game bug on Youtube.
Studying the impact of release strategies
New development strategies, such as DevOps, enable testing and deployment of new software releases in a much more efficient manner. We study how users perceive releases, and how the chosen release strategy affects the user-perceived quality. For example, we studied urgent updates of games, and found that a frequent release strategy is associated with a higher number of 0-day urgent updates. We also studied why some releases of mobile apps are perceived negatively by users.
