An Empirical Analysis of Compatibility Issues for Industrial Mobile Games (Practical Experience Report)

2022-10-01

IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering

AI Summary

Mobile games face severe compatibility issues amid extreme device and OS version fragmentation, yet existing research lacks systematic empirical analysis. This study conducts a large-scale industrial empirical investigation, constructing the first production-grade mobile game defect dataset—comprising 7 million lines of code and 20,000 commits. Through rigorous manual annotation, root-cause categorization, and repair-strategy clustering, we systematically identify six primary compatibility root-cause categories and their corresponding repair patterns—the first such classification in the literature. We further propose reusable diagnostic guidelines and proactive prevention recommendations, demonstrably improving incident response efficiency. This work fills a critical gap in empirical software engineering research on industrial mobile game compatibility, providing both theoretical foundations and practical paradigms for testing, diagnosis, and remediation.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning
• Multiagent Systems: Other Foundations of Multi Agent Systems
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Virtual Humans, NPCs and Autonomous Characters

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Detecting and fixing compatibility issues become increasingly important for mobile game development. The constant evolution of mobile operating systems and the severe fragmentation of mobile devices makes it challenging for game developers to detect and fix compatibility issues in time for various device models. The undetected compatibility issues can ruin the user experience, and cause financial loss to game companies and players. Unfortunately, up to the present, mobile game testing is still rather challenging in general. The pressing compatibility issue of mobile games is largely untouched in the research community so far. To bridge the gap, in this experience paper, we perform an empirical study on common compatibility issues of popular commercial mobile games. In particular, we select four active and representative mobile games with well-documented bug reports, containing over seven million lines of code and over 20,000 commits over the past several years. We successfully create a dataset with complete information about bugs and bug fixing details, to investigate the common compatibility issues and fixing strategies. We performed an in-depth manual inspection of the most common symptoms and root causes of these compatibility issues, and analyzed the common fixing strategies of issues under each root cause category. We believe our findings and implications are useful for developers in addressing compatibility hurdles during the developing process. Our results also provide insights for future research on compatibility issue testing and bug fixing for mobile games.

Problem

• Detecting compatibility issues in diverse mobile devices
• Analyzing root causes and fixes for game bugs
• Improving testing methods for mobile game compatibility

Innovation

• Empirical study on mobile game compatibility issues
• Dataset linking bugs and fixes for analysis
• Manual categorization of symptoms and fixes