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Software Analytics for Digital Games

Software and its development generates an inordinate amount of data. Development activities such as check-ins, work items, bug reports, code reviews, and test executions are recorded in software repositories. User interactions that reflect how customers experience software are recorded in telemetry data, run-time traces, and log files and helps to track application and feature usage and expose performance and reliability. Software analytics takes this data and turns it into actionable insight to better inform decisions related to software. In this talk, I will summarize our efforts in the area of software analytics with a special focus on digital games. I will present several examples of games studies, which we have worked on at Microsoft Research such as how players are engaged in Project Gotham Racing, how skill develops over time in Halo Reach and Forza Motor sports, and the initial experience of game play. I will also point out important differences between games development and traditional software development. The work presented in this talk has been done by Nachi Nagappan, myself, and many others who have visited our group over the past years.