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Recent research has provided evidence that, in the industrial context, developing video games diverges from developing software systems in other domains, such as office suites and system utilities. In this paper, we consider video game development in the open source system (OSS) context. Specifically, we investigate how developers contribute to video games vs. non-games by working on different kinds of artifacts, how they handle malfunctions, and how they perceive the development process of their projects. To this purpose, we conducted a mixed, qualitative and quantitative study on a broad suite of 60 OSS projects. Our results confirm the existence of significant differences between game and non-game development, in terms of how project resources are organized and in the diversity of developers’ specializations. Moreover, game developers respond- ing to our survey perceive more difficulties than other developers when reusing code as well as performing automated testing, and they lack a clear overview of their system’s requirements.

A well-known bad code smell in refactoring and software maintenance is duplicated code, or code clones. A code clone is a code fragment that is identical or similar to another. Unjustified code clones increase code size, make maintenance and comprehension more difficult, and also indicate design problems such as lack of encapsulation or abstraction. This paper proposes a token and AST based hybrid approach to automatically detecting code clones in Erlang/OTP programs, underlying a collection of refactorings to support user-controlled automatic clone removal, and examines their application in substantial case studies. Both the clone detector and the refactorings are integrated within Wrangler, the refactoring tool developed at Kent for Erlang/OTP.

Refactoring is about changing the design of existing code without changing its behaviour, but with the aim of making code easier to understand, modify, or reuse. Taking Haskell and Erlang as examples, we investigate the application of refactoring techniques to functional programs, and building tools for supporting interactive refactoring. Although both Haskell and Erlang are general-purpose functional programming languages, they have many differences in their language design and programming idioms. As a result, program refactoring in the two languages has much in common, but also considerable differences. This paper makes this comparison, and in particular looks in more detail at the refactorings applicable in each language, the program analysis required by typical refactorings, and at tool support for refactoring Haskell and Erlang programs.