An Industrial Experience Leveraging the iv4XR Framework for BDD Testing of a 3D Sandbox Game

Industrial-grade games, like Space Engineers, must adopt swift development and testing processes to conform to rigorous quality standards. Nevertheless, the testing phase of these extensive and complex games heavily relies on manual effort from play-testers, leading to productivity constraints during development cycles. This experience paper reports a Behavior-Driven-Development (BDD) software development process for automated regression test scenarios that allows complement testers’ work during development cycles. To enable BDD test scripts for the Space Engineers game, we have extended the iv4XR framework into a game plugin to connect and execute game actions. Additionally, we have integrated the Cucumber software to describe game test scenarios using natural language. This approach allows testers to create, maintain, and execute a subset of regression test scenarios by relying on a BDD agent that can autonomously verify Space Engineers game features, enabling seamless integration into the development cycle.