A Game Framework Supporting Automatic Functional Testing for Games

Abstract

When developing a computer (mobile) game, testing the game is an important task and takes a large share of the development cost. So far, testing a game’s functional features relies mainly on human testers, who personally plays the game, and is thus labor intensive. This paper proposes a method that automates game testing. Since games are usually built on top of game frameworks, the idea is to enhance a game framework with a testing layer, which can execute (playback) test scripts that perform user events and assert the correctness of the game. We design an HTML5 game framework with such a support. In addition, a case study is performed to compare the testing cost of three different methods: writing a test script directly, recording a test script, and testing the game directly by a human tester. The results showed that when repeated testings are necessary, an automatic testing (either writing or recording test scripts) can reduce human cost. Among these three testing methods, recording scripts was the most favored method.