An empirical study of GUI widget detection for industrial mobile games

With the widespread adoption of smartphones in our daily life, mobile games experienced increasing demand over the past years. Meanwhile, the quality of mobile games has been continuously drawing more and more attention, which can greatly affect the player experience. For better quality assurance, general-purpose testing has been extensively studied for mobile apps. However, due to the unique characteristic of mobile games, existing mobile testing techniques may not be directly suitable and applicable. To better understand the challenges in mobile game testing, in this paper, we first initiate an early step to conduct an empirical study towards understanding the challenges and pain points of mobile game testing process at our industrial partner NetEase Games. Specifically, we first conduct a survey from the mobile test development team at NetEase Games via both scrum interviews and questionnaires. We found that accurate and effective GUI widget detection for mobile games could be the pillar to boost the automation of mobile game testing and other downstream analysis tasks in practice.