2026

1. LLM-Based NPCs in Video Games: A Systematic Mapping Study

   Dilan Mian, Jeremy S. Bradbury, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo, Cristiano Politowski

   IEEE Trans. Games, 2026

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2. Persona-Based Agents for Video Game Playtesting: A Systematic Mapping Study

   Caio Varalta, Leonardo Tórtoro Pereira, Murilo Mazzotti Silvestrini, Cristiano Politowski

   IEEE Trans. Games, 2026

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3. RIDGE: State-Conditioned Reward Blending for Behavioral Coverage in Deep RL Game AgentsOral

   Al Muqshith Mohammed Shifan, Kevin Christopher Chua, Ali Neshati, Loutfouz Zaman, Cristiano Politowski

   IEEE Conference on Games, CoG 2026, Madrid, Spain, September 1-4, 2026, 2026
4. Beyond Metrics: A Human Validation Study of Procedural Personas in a Continuous Game ArenaArtifact evaluatedPoster

   Caio Varalta, Arnaldo Martins Godoy, Eugênio Mesquita Higgins Azevedo Santos, Leonardo Tórtoro Pereira, Cristiano Politowski

   Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AIIDE 2026, 2026
5. Controlled Natural Language for Requirements Specification: A Systematic Literature Review

   Ikram Darif, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Segla Kpodjedo, Cristiano Politowski

   ACM Comput. Surv., 2026

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6. Characterizing Open-Source Video Games from a Software Engineering Perspective

   Henrique Mandelli Canella, Yohan Duarte, Cristiano Politowski, Vinicius H. S. Durelli, André Takeshi Endo

   Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 10th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 12-18, 2026, 2026

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7. CG-WFC: A Hybrid Cyclic-Graph & WFC Method for Designer-Guided and Replayable Procedural Content Generation

   Laurent Voisard, Cristiano Politowski, Fabio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 10th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 12-18, 2026, 2026

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8. Creativity Beyond Functionality: An Observational Study of Easter Eggs in Video Games

   Cristiano Politowski, Claudio Di Sipio, Benoit Baudry, Michalis Famelis, Houari A. Sahraoui

   Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 10th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 12-18, 2026, 2026

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9. Multilingual Game Dialogue Translation using Large Language Models: A Performance Survey

   Quang Phuoc Nguyen, Cristiano Politowski, Labib Rahman, En-Shiun Annie Lee

   Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 10th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS 2026, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 12-18, 2026, 2026

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2025

1. SyDRA: An approach to understand game engine architecture

   Gabriel C. Ullmann, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo, Nicolas Anquetil, Cristiano Politowski

   Entertain. Comput., 2025

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2. Unboxing Default Argument Breaking Changes in 1 + 2 data science libraries

   João Eduardo Montandon, Luciana Lourdes Silva, Cristiano Politowski, Daniel Prates, Arthur Brito Bonifácio, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi

   J. Syst. Softw., 2025

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3. On the Need for Reproducibility Guidelines for Open-Source Games: A itch.io Case Study

   Claudio Di Sipio, Andrea D’Angelo, Riccardo Rubei, Cristiano Politowski

   IEEE Conference on Games, CoG 2025, Lisbon, Portugal, August 26-29, 2025, 2025

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4. Towards a framework for exploratory testing in video games

   Yohan Duarte, Cristiano Politowski, André Takeshi Endo

   9th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE 2025, Ottawa, ON, Canada, April 29, 2025, 2025

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5. A Mapping Study of the Entity Component System Pattern

   Laurent Voisard, Henrique De Freitas Serra, Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   9th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE 2025, Ottawa, ON, Canada, April 29, 2025, 2025

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2024

1. PlayMyData: a curated dataset of multi-platform video games

   Andrea D’Angelo, Claudio Di Sipio, Cristiano Politowski, Riccardo Rubei

   21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2024, Lisbon, Portugal, April 15-16, 2024, 2024

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2023

1. On the Impact of Development Frameworks on Mobile Apps

   Parsa Karami, Ikram Darif, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Sègla Kpodjedo, Imen Benzarti

   30th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2023, Seoul, Republic of Korea, December 4-7, 2023, 2023

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2. An Exploratory Approach for Game Engine Architecture Recovery

   Gabriel C. Ullmann, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo, Nicolas Anquetil, Cristiano Politowski

   7th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE 2023, Melbourne, Australia, May 15, 2023, 2023

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3. Assessing Video Game Balance using Autonomous Agents

   Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Gabriel C. Ullmann, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   7th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE 2023, Melbourne, Australia, May 15, 2023, 2023

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4. Visualising Game Engine Subsystem Coupling Patterns

   Gabriel C. Ullmann, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo, Nicolas Anquetil, Cristiano Politowski

   Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2023 - 22nd IFIP TC 14 International Conference, ICEC 2023, Bologna, Italy, November 15-17, 2023, Proceedings, 2023

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5. A Model-driven and Template-based Approach for Requirements Specification

   Ikram Darif, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Imen Benzarti, Sègla Kpodjedo

   26th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, MODELS 2023, Västerås, Sweden, October 1-6, 2023, 2023

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6. Unboxing Default Argument Breaking Changes in Scikit Learn

   João Eduardo Montandon, Luciana Lourdes Silva, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Marco Túlio Valente

   23rd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, SCAM 2023, Bogotá, Colombia, October 2-3, 2023, 2023

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7. Event Driven Architecture: An Exploratory Study on The Gap between Academia and Industry

   Nader Trabelsi, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi

   5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Practices for the IoT, SERP4IoT)@ICSE 2023, Melbourne, Australia, May 20, 2023, 2023

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2022

1. Video Game Project Management Anti-patterns

   Gabriel C. Ullmann, Cristiano Politowski, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo, João Eduardo Montandon

   6th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, May 20, 2022, 2022

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2. What Makes a Game High-rated? Towards Factors of Video Game Success

   Gabriel C. Ullmann, Cristiano Politowski, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo

   6th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, May 20, 2022, 2022

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3. Towards Automated Video Game Testing: Still a Long Way to Go

   Cristiano Politowski, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo

   6th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, May 20, 2022, 2022

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4. A Domain Specific Language for the ARINC 653 Specification

   Ikram Darif, Cristiano Politowski, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Sègla Kpodjedo

   IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops, ISSRE 2022 - Workshops, Charlotte, NC, USA, October 31 - Nov. 3, 2022, 2022

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5. Game Engine Comparative Anatomy

   Gabriel C. Ullmann, Cristiano Politowski, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Fábio Petrillo

   Entertainment Computing - ICEC 2022 - 21st IFIP TC 14 International Conference, ICEC 2022, Bremen, Germany, November 1-3, 2022, Proceedings, 2022

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2021

1. What skills do IT companies look for in new developers? A study with Stack Overflow jobs

   João Eduardo Montandon, Cristiano Politowski, Luciana Lourdes Silva, Marco Túlio Valente, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   Inf. Softw. Technol., 2021

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2. Game industry problems: An extensive analysis of the gray literatureSelected

   Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Gabriel C. Ullmann, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   Inf. Softw. Technol., 2021

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3. Are game engines software frameworks? A three-perspective study

   Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, João Eduardo Montandon, Marco Túlio Valente, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   J. Syst. Softw., 2021

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4. A Survey of Video Game TestingSelected

   Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automation of Software Test, AST@ICSE 2021, Madrid, Spain, May 20-21, 2021, 2021

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2020

1. A large scale empirical study of the impact of Spaghetti Code and Blob anti-patterns on program comprehension

   Cristiano Politowski, Foutse Khomh, Simone Romano, Giuseppe Scanniello, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Abdou Maiga

   Inf. Softw. Technol., 2020

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2. Improving Engagement Assessment in Gameplay Testing Sessions using IoT Sensors

   Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   ICSE ’20: 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Workshops, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 27 June - 19 July, 2020, 2020

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3. Dataset of Video Game Development Problems

   Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Gabriel Cavalheiro Ullmann, Josias Andrade Werly, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   MSR ’20: 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 29-30 June, 2020, 2020

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2018

1. Learning from the past: A process recommendation system for video game projects using postmortems experiences

   Cristiano Politowski, Lisandra M. Fontoura, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   Inf. Softw. Technol., 2018

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2016

1. Are the old days gone?: a survey on actual software engineering processes in video game industry

   Cristiano Politowski, Lisandra M. Fontoura, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

   Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, GAS@ICSE 2016, Austin, Texas, USA, May 16, 2016, 2016

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