arXiv subjects

Cristiano Politowski

Publications and source records attributed to Cristiano Politowski.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Legacy System Modernization with Coding Agents: A Case Study

Legacy systems built on discontinued platforms are a recurring technological liability in organizations that depend on these applications to sustain critical business processes. Although modernization is strategically necessary, it is costly and error-prone when performed exclusively through manual effort. In this paper, we report on a case study conducted in a real industrial setting, where we evaluate both the effectiveness and efficiency of AI coding agents in supporting the migration of legacy systems to modern platforms. By using one version of Claude Code agent, we migrated 12 features of distinct complexity levels from a corporate ERP system written in Visual Basic 6 to C# .NET 10 under a single-generation strategy. Once the migration sessions were completed, we measured the equivalence of the migrated features against the original ones, and collected data about the time spent and the number of tokens consumed by the agent during the process. In our experiment, the agent achieved an average equivalence of 70%, with a strong asymmetry across complexity levels; low-level features achieved 92%, and high-complexity ones scored 47%. Similar asymmetry was observed in the cost-based metrics; low-level features consumed 1.47M tokens ($1.66), whereas high-level ones used 9.09M ($10.28). We reveal the practical scenarios and circumstances where this migration strategy is more effective, as well as discuss the limitations and challenges of using AI agents for legacy system modernization.

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arXiv2025

Unboxing Default Argument Breaking Changes in 1 + 2 Data Science Libraries

Data Science (DS) has become a cornerstone for modern software, enabling data-driven decisions to improve companies services. Following modern software development practices, data scientists use third-party libraries to support their tasks. As the APIs provided by these tools often require an extensive list of arguments to be set up, data scientists rely on default values to simplify their usage. It turns out that these default values can change over time, leading to a specific type of breaking change, defined as Default Argument Breaking Change (DABC). This work reveals 93 DABCs in three Python libraries frequently used in Data Science tasks -- Scikit Learn, NumPy, and Pandas -- studying their potential impact on more than 500K client applications. We find out that the occurrence of DABCs varies significantly depending on the library; 35% of Scikit Learn clients are affected, while only 0.13% of NumPy clients are impacted. The main reason for introducing DABCs is to enhance API maintainability, but they often change the function's behavior. We discuss the importance of managing DABCs in third-party DS libraries and provide insights for developers to mitigate the potential impact of these changes in their applications.

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arXiv2024

SyDRA: An Approach to Understand Game Engine Architecture

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 to maintainability and evolution issues that negatively affect video game productions. In this paper, we present the Subsystem-Dependency Recovery Approach (SyDRA), which helps game engine developers understand game engine architecture and therefore make informed game engine development choices. By applying this approach to 10 open-source game engines, we obtain architectural models that can be used to compare game engine architectures and identify and solve issues of excessive coupling and folder nesting. Through a controlled experiment, we show that the inspection of the architectural models derived from SyDRA enables developers to complete tasks related to architectural understanding and impact analysis in less time and with higher correctness than without these models.

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arXiv2024

PlayMyData: a curated dataset of multi-platform video games

Being predominant in digital entertainment for decades, video games have been recognized as valuable software artifacts by the software engineering (SE) community just recently. Such an acknowledgment has unveiled several research opportunities, spanning from empirical studies to the application of AI techniques for classification tasks. In this respect, several curated game datasets have been disclosed for research purposes even though the collected data are insufficient to support the application of advanced models or to enable interdisciplinary studies. Moreover, the majority of those are limited to PC games, thus excluding notorious gaming platforms, e.g., PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. In this paper, we propose PlayMyData, a curated dataset composed of 99,864 multi-platform games gathered by IGDB website. By exploiting a dedicated API, we collect relevant metadata for each game, e.g., description, genre, rating, gameplay video URLs, and screenshots. Furthermore, we enrich PlayMyData with the timing needed to complete each game by mining the HLTB website. To the best of our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive dataset in the domain that can be used to support different automated tasks in SE. More importantly, PlayMyData can be used to foster cross-domain investigations built on top of the provided multimedia data.

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arXiv2023

Visualising Game Engine Subsystem Coupling

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 engines. We use these models to answer the following questions: Which subsystems more often couple with one another? Do game engines share subsystem coupling patterns? We observe that the Low-Level Renderer, Platform Independence Layer and Resource Manager are frequently coupled to the game engine Core. By identifying the most frequent coupling patterns, we describe an emergent game engine architecture and discuss how it can be used by practitioners to improve system understanding and maintainability.

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arXiv2023

Assessing Video Game Balance using Autonomous Agents

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 autonomous agents. We evaluate our approach with two platform games. We bring a systematic way to assess if a game is balanced by (1) comparing the difficulty levels between game versions and issues with the game design, and (2) the game demands for skill or luck.

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arXiv2023

An Exploratory Approach for Game Engine Architecture Recovery

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 architectural understanding. However, architectural information is not always readily available and is often overlooked in this kind of system. In this work, we propose an approach for game engine architecture recovery and explore the architecture of three popular open-source game engines (Cocos2d-x, Godot, and Urho3D). We perform manual subsystem detection and use Moose, a platform for software analysis, to generate architectural models. With these models, we answer the following questions: Which subsystems are present in game engines? Which subsystems are more often coupled with one another? Why are these subsystems coupled with each other? Results show that the platform independence, resource management, world editor, and core subsystems are frequently included by others and therefore act as foundations for the game engines. Furthermore, we show that, by applying our approach, game engine developers can understand whether subsystems are related and divide responsibilities. They can also assess whether relationships among subsystems are appropriate for the game engine.

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arXiv2022

Game Engine Comparative Anatomy

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 progress, we compare the call graphs of two open-source engines: Godot 3.4.4 and Urho3D 1.8. While static analysis tools could provide us with a general picture without precise call graph paths, the use of a profiler such as Callgrind allows us to also view the call order and frequency. These graphs give us insight into the engines' designs. We showed that, by using Callgrind, we can obtain a high-level view of an engine's architecture, which can be used to understand it. In future work, we intend to apply both dynamic and static analysis to other open-source engines to understand architectural patterns and their impact on aspects such as performance and maintenance.

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arXiv2022

What Makes a Game High-rated? Towards Factors of Video Game Success

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 with the game's success. A further analysis on the high-rated games shows that team, technical, and game-design aspects should be the main focus of the game developers.

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arXiv2022

Video Game Project Management Anti-patterns

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. In this paper, we map project management anti-patterns to anti-patterns reported by game developers in the gray literature. We read 440 postmortems problems, identified anti-pattern candidates, and related them with definitions from the software-engineering literature. We discovered that most anti-pattern candidates could be mapped to anti-patterns in the software-engineering literature, except for Feature Creep, Feature Cuts, Working on Multiple Projects, and Absent or Inadequate Tools. We discussed the impact of the unmapped candidates on the development process while also drawing a parallel between video games and traditional software development. Future works include validating the definitions of the candidates via survey with practitioners and also considering development anti-patterns.

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arXiv2022

Towards Automated Video Game Testing: Still a Long Way to Go

As the complexity and scope of game development increase, 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 study, we investigate gaps between academic solutions in the literature for automated video game testing and the needs of video game developers in the industry. We performed a literature review on video game automated testing and applied an online survey with video game developers. The literature results show a rise in research topics related to automated video game testing. The survey results show that game developers are skeptical about using automated agents to test games. We conclude that there is a need for new testing approaches that did not disrupt the developer workflow. As for the researchers, the focus should be on the testing goal and testing oracle.

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arXiv2021

A Survey of Video Game Testing

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 developers perform game testing. We investigate, through a survey, the academic and gray literature to identify and report on existing testing processes and how they could automate them. We found that game developers rely, almost exclusively, upon manual play-testing and the testers' intrinsic knowledge. We conclude that current testing processes fall short because of their lack of automation, which seems to be the natural next step to improve the quality of games while maintaining costs. However, the current game-testing techniques may not generalize to different types of games.

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arXiv2021

Game Industry Problems: an Extensive Analysis of the Gray Literature

Context: Given its competitiveness, the video-game industry has a closed-source culture. Hence, 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 the video game industry, in particular the problems faced by game developers, their evolution in time, and their root causes. This state of the practice would allow researchers and practitioners to work towards solving these problems. Method: We analyzed 200 postmortems from 1997 to 2019, resulting in 927 problems divided into 20 types. Through our analysis, we described the overall landscape of game industry problems in the past 23 years and how these problems evolved over the years. We also give details on the most common problems, their root causes, and possible solutions. We finally discuss suggestions for future projects. Results: We observe that (1) the game industry suffers from management and production problems in the same proportion; (2) management problems decreased over the years giving space to business problems, while production problems remained constant; (3a) technical and game design problems are decreasing over the years, the latter only after the last decade; (3b) problems related to the team increase over the last decade;(3c) marketing problems are the ones that had the biggest increase over the 23 years compared to other problem types; (4) finally, the majority of the main root causes are related to people, not technologies. Conclusions: In this paper we provide a state of the practice for researchers to understand and study video-game development problems. We also offer suggestions to help practitioners to avoid the most common problems.

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arXiv2020

What Skills do IT Companies look for in New Developers? A Study with Stack Overflow Jobs

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 types of hard skills are more requested. Further, we manually analyzed the most mentioned soft skills. Results: Programming languages are the most demanded hard skills. Communication, collaboration, and problem-solving are the most demanded soft skills. Conclusion: We recommend developers to organize their resumé according to the positions they are applying. We also highlight the importance of soft skills, as they appear in many job opportunities.

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arXiv2020

Are Game Engines Software Frameworks? A Three-perspective Study

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 summarise the academic literature on game engines. Second, we compare the characteristics of the 282 most popular engines and the 282 most popular frameworks in GitHub. Finally, we survey 124 engine developers about their experience with the development of their engines. We report that: (1) Game engines are not well-studied in software-engineering research with few studies having engines as object of research. (2) Open-source game engines are slightly larger in terms of size and complexity and less popular and engaging than traditional frameworks. Their programming languages differ greatly from frameworks. Engine projects have shorter histories with less releases. (3) Developers perceive game engines as different from traditional frameworks. Generally, they build game engines to (a) better control the environment and source code, (b) learn about game engines, and (c) develop specific games. We conclude that open-source game engines have differences compared to traditional open-source frameworks although this differences do not demand special treatments.

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arXiv2020

Dataset of Video Game Development Problems

Different from traditional software development, there is little information about the software-engineering process and techniques in video-game development. One popular way to share knowledge among the video-game developers' community is the publishing of postmortems, which are documents summarizing what happened during the video-game development project. However, these documents are written without formal structure and often providing disparate information. Through this paper, we provide developers and researchers with grounded dataset describing software-engineering problems in video-game development extracted from postmortems. We created the dataset using an iterative method through which we manually coded more than 200 postmortems spanning 20 years (1998 to 2018) and extracted 1,035 problems related to software engineering while maintaining traceability links to the postmortems. We grouped the problems in 20 different types. This dataset is useful to understand the problems faced by developers during video-game development, providing researchers and practitioners a starting point to study video-game development in the context of software engineering.

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arXiv2020

Learning from the past: A process recommendation system for video game projects using postmortems experiences

Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist developers by generating recommendations to help them perform their tasks. Objective: This article describes a systematic approach to recommend development processes for video game projects, using postmortem knowledge extraction and a model of the context of the new project, in which "postmortems" are articles written by video game developers at the end of projects, summarizing the experience of their game development team. This approach aims to provide reflections about development processes used in the game industry as well as guidance to developers to choose the most adequate process according to the contexts they're in. Method: Our approach is divided in three separate phases: in the the first phase, we manually extracted the processes from the postmortems analysis; in the second one, we created a video game context and algorithm rules for recommendation; and finally in the third phase, we evaluated the recommended processes by using quantitative and qualitative metrics, game developers feedback, and a case study by interviewing a video game development team. Contributions: This article brings three main contributions. The first describes a database of developers' experiences extracted from postmortems in the form of development processes. The second defines the main attributes that a video game project contain, which it uses to define the contexts of the project. The third describes and evaluates a recommendation system for video game projects, which uses the contexts of the projects to identify similar projects and suggest a set of activities in the form of a process.

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arXiv2020

A Large Scale Empirical Study of the Impact of Spaghetti Code and Blob Anti-patterns on Program Comprehension

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 source code must be easy to understand by developers. Objective: In this work, we provide a complete assessment of the impact of two instances of two anti-patterns, Blob or Spaghetti Code, on program comprehension. Method: We analyze the impact of these two anti-patterns through three empirical studies conducted at Polytechnique Montréal (Canada) with 24 participants; at Carlton University (Canada) with 30 participants; and at University Basilicata (Italy) with 79 participants. Results: We collect data from 372 tasks obtained thanks to 133 different participants from the three universities. We use three metrics to assess the developers' comprehension of the source code: (1) the duration to complete each task; (2) their percentage of correct answers; and, (3) the NASA task load index for their effort. Conclusions: We report that, although single occurrences of Blob or Spaghetti code anti-patterns have little effect on code comprehension, two occurrences of either Blob or Spaghetti Code significantly increases the developers' time spent in their tasks, reduce their percentage of correct answers, and increase their effort. Hence, we recommend that developers act on both anti-patterns, which should be refactored out of the source code whenever possible. We also recommend further studies on combinations of anti-patterns rather than on single anti-patterns one at a time.

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