Open source computer game application: An empirical analysis of quality concerns

A computer game is one of the major sources of entertainment. People nowadays spend a lot of time while playing computer games. Open Source Software (OSS), despite some reservations on the quality, has been steadily increasing its popularity. The uncontrolled change management foresees an increase in the complexity of the methods and classes in an application, which sometimes result in poor quality. The number of OSS projects dealing with computer game development are on the increase, which lead to more research interests in assessing the quality of OSS resulting products. Some studies that deal with the evaluating the OSS quality, concerns use user's survey approach focusing on the usability aspects. The empirical investigations to evaluate the quality concerns of the design, using internal code attributes, needs attention of researchers. In this study, we aim to investigate the quality concerns of the design complexity of methods in OSS computer game applications using internal code attributes. We use three quality criteria, namely correctness, reliability and maintainability from the set of six factors of ISO 9126 model. We collect data from 55 OSS computer game applications and use various statistical analysis techniques to examine the research question of this study. We conclude that the methods of the OSS computer game applications demonstrate an acceptable level of quality in the three criteria of correctness, reliability and maintainability.