Dataset of Video Game Development Problems
This provides a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners to study video-game development in software engineering, though it is incremental as it organizes existing unstructured data.
The authors tackled the lack of structured information on software-engineering problems in video-game development by creating a dataset of 1,035 problems extracted from over 200 postmortems spanning 20 years, grouped into 20 types.
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.