Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
5-2023
Abstract
The fast advances in mobile hardware and widespread smartphone usage have fueled the growth of global mobile gaming in the past decade. As a result, the need for quality assurance of mobile gaming has become increasingly pressing. While general-purpose testing methods have been developed for mobile applications, they become struggling when being applied to mobile games due to the unique characteristics of mobile games, such as dynamic loading and stunning visual effects. There comes a growing industrial demand for automated testing techniques with high compatibility (compatible with various resolutions, and platforms) and non-intrusive characteristics (without packaging external modules into the source code, e.g., POCO). To fulfill these demands, in this paper, we introduce our experience in adopting the widget detection-based testing technique WDTEST, for mobile games at NetEase Games. To this end, we have constructed by far the largest graphical user interface (GUI) dataset for mobile games and conducted comprehensive evaluations on the performance of state-of-the-art widget detection techniques in the context of mobile gaming.We leverage widget detection techniques to develop WDTEST, which performs automated testing using only screenshots as input. Our evaluation shows that WDTEST outperforms the widely used tool Monkey in achieving three times more coverage of unique UI in gaming scenarios. Our further experiments demonstrate that WDTEST can be applied to general mobile applications without additional fine-tuning. Furthermore, we conducted a thorough survey at NetEase Games to gain a comprehensive understanding of widget detection-based testing techniques and identify challenges in industrial mobile game testing. The results show that testers are overall satisfied with the compatibility testing aspect of widget detection-based testing, but not much with functionality testing. This survey also highlights several unique characteristics of mobile games, providing valuable insights for future research directions
Keywords
Game testing, Graphical user interface detection, Graphical user interface testing, Interface detection, Interface testing, Mobile game testing, Mobile games, Mobile gaming, Software quality assurance, Testing technique
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Cybersecurity
Publication
Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, Melbourne, Australia, May 14-20
First Page
173
Last Page
184
ISBN
9798350300376
Identifier
10.1109/ICSE-SEIP58684.2023.00021
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
New York, USA
Citation
WU, Xiongfei; YE, Jiaming; CHEN, Ke; XIE, Xiaofei; HUANG, Ruochen; MA, Lei; and ZHAO, Jianjun.
Widget detection-based testing for industrial mobile games. (2023). Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, Melbourne, Australia, May 14-20. 173-184.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8229
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEIP58684.2023.00021