VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Finlay Macklon
dblp:311/5363
· DBLP profile ↗
5ranked-venue papers
3as first author
5since 2021 · last 2027
0000-0002-1319-7215ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 4 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2027 | Exploring the capabilities of vision-language models to detect visual bugs in HTML5 canvas applications
Finlay Macklon, Cedric Boucher, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
Empir. Softw. Eng. | 1 |
| 2024 | Searching Bug Instances in Gameplay Video RepositoriesabstractGameplay videos offer valuable insights into player interactions and game responses, particularly data about game bugs. Despite the abundance of gameplay videos online, extracting useful information remains a challenge. This paper introduces a method for searching and extracting relevant videos from extensive video repositories using English text queries. Our approach requires no external information, like video metadata; it solely depends on video content. Leveraging the zero-shot transfer capabilities of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, our approach does not require any data labeling or training. To evaluate our approach, we present theGamePhysicsdataset, comprising 26,954 videos from 1,873 games that were collected from the GamePhysics section on the Reddit website. Our approach shows promising results in our extensive analysis of simple and compound queries, indicating that our method is useful for detecting objects and events in gameplay videos. Moreover, we assess the effectiveness of our method by analyzing a carefully annotated dataset of 220 gameplay videos. The results of our study demonstrate the potential of our approach for applications such as the creation of a video search tool tailored to identifying video game bugs, which could greatly benefit Quality Assurance (QA) teams in finding and reproducing bugs. The code and data used in this paper can be found athttps://zenodo.org/records/10211390 Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Finlay Macklon, Sarra Habchi, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
IEEE Trans. Games | 2 |
| 2023 | A Taxonomy of Testable HTML5 Canvas IssuesabstractThe HTML5canvas> is widely used to display high quality graphics in web applications. However, the combination of web, GUI, and visual techniques that are required to buildcanvas> applications, together with the lack of testing and debugging tools, makes developing such applications very challenging. To help direct future research on testingcanvas> applications, in this paper we present a taxonomy of testablecanvas> issues. First, we extracted 2,403canvas>-related issue reports from 123 open source GitHub projects that use the HTML5canvas>. Second, we constructed our taxonomy by manually classifying a random sample of 332 issue reports. Our manual classification identified five broad categories of testablecanvas> issues, such as Visual and Performance issues. We found that Visual issues are the most frequent (35%), while Performance issues are relatively infrequent (5%). We also found that many testablecanvas> issues that present themselves visually on thecanvas> are actually caused by other components of the web application. Our taxonomy of testablecanvas> issues can be used to steer future research intocanvas> issues and testing. Finlay Macklon, Markos Viggiato, Natalia Romanova, Chris Buzon, Dale Paas, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
IEEE Trans. Software Eng. | 1 |
| 2022 | Automatically Detecting Visual Bugs in HTML5 Canvas GamesabstractThe HTML5 is used to display high quality graphics in web applications such as web games (i.e., games). However, automatically testing games is not possible with existing web testing techniques and tools, and manual testing is laborious. Many widely used web testing tools rely on the Document Object Model (DOM) to drive web test automation, but the contents of the are not represented in the DOM. The main alternative approach, snapshot testing, involves comparing oracle snapshot images with test-time snapshot images using an image similarity metric to catch visual bugs, i.e., bugs in the graphics of the web application. However, creating and maintaining oracle snapshot images for games is onerous, defeating the purpose of test automation. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically detect visual bugs in games. By leveraging an internal representation of objects on the , we decompose snapshot images into a set of object images, each of which is compared with a respective oracle asset (e.g., a sprite) using four similarity metrics: percentage overlap, mean squared error, structural similarity, and embedding similarity. We evaluate our approach by injecting 24 visual bugs into a custom game, and find that our approach achieves an accuracy of 100%, compared to an accuracy of 44.6% with traditional snapshot testing. Finlay Macklon, Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Markos Viggiato, Stefan Antoszko, Natalia Romanova, Dale Paas, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
ASE | 1 |
| 2022 | CLIP meets GamePhysics: Towards bug identification in gameplay videos using zero-shot transfer learningabstractGameplay videos contain rich information about how players interact with the game and how the game responds. Sharing gameplay videos on social media platforms, such as Reddit, has become a common practice for many players. Often, players will share game-play videos that showcase video game bugs. Such gameplay videos are software artifacts that can be utilized for game testing, as they provide insight for bug analysis. Although large repositories of gameplay videos exist, parsing and mining them in an effective and structured fashion has still remained a big challenge. In this paper, we propose a search method that accepts any English text query as input to retrieve relevant videos from large repositories of gameplay videos. Our approach does not rely on any external information (such as video metadata); it works solely based on the content of the video. By leveraging the zero-shot transfer capabilities of the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, our approach does not require any data labeling or training. To evaluate our approach, we present the GamePhysics dataset consisting of 26,954 videos from 1,873 games, that were collected from the GamePhysics section on the Reddit website. Our approach shows promising results in our extensive analysis of simple queries, compound queries, and bug queries, indicating that our approach is useful for object and event detection in gameplay videos. An example application of our approach is as a gameplay video search engine to aid in reproducing video game bugs. Please visit the following link for the code and the data: https://asgaardlab.github.io/CLIPxGamePhysics/ Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Finlay Macklon, Cor-Paul Bezemer |
MSR | 2 |