Testing video games is an increasingly difficult task as traditional methods fail to scale with growing software systems. Manual testing is a very labor-intensive process, and therefore quickly becomes cost prohibitive. Using scripts for automated testing is affordable, however scripts are ineffective in non-deterministic environments, and knowing when to run each test is another problem altogether. Manual testing and writing scripts make up the current industry standard and methodology for game testing, but the writing is on the wall for this practice. The modern game's complexity, scope, and player expectations are rapidly increasing where quality control is a big portion of the production cost and delivery risk. Reducing this risk and making production happen is a big challenge for the industry currently. To keep production costs realistic up-to and after release, we are focusing on preventive quality assurance tactics alongside testing and data analysis automation. We present SUPERNOVA (Selection of tests and Universal defect Prevention in External Repositories for Novel Objective Verification of software Anomalies), a system responsible for test selection and defect prevention while also functioning as an automation hub. By integrating data analysis functionality with machine and deep learning capability, SUPERNOVA assists quality assurance testers in finding bugs and developers in reducing defects, which improves stability during the production cycle and keeps testing costs under control. The direct impact of this has been observed to be a reduction in 55% or more testing hours for an undisclosed sports game title that has shipped, which was using these test selection optimizations. Furthermore, using risk scores generated by a semi-supervised machine learning model, we are able to detect with 71% precision and 77% recall the probability of a change-list being bug inducing, and provide a detailed breakdown of this inference to developers. These efforts improve workflow and reduce testing hours required on game titles in development.

MOTIVATION: Transcriptome sequencing has long been the favored method for quickly and inexpensively obtaining a large number of gene sequences from an organism with no reference genome. Owing to the rapid increase in throughputs and decrease in costs of next- generation sequencing, RNA-Seq in particular has become the method of choice. However, the very short reads (e.g. 2 × 90 bp paired ends) from next generation sequencing makes de novo assembly to recover complete or full-length transcript sequences an algorithmic challenge. RESULTS: Here, we present SOAPdenovo-Trans, a de novo transcriptome assembler designed specifically for RNA-Seq. We evaluated its performance on transcriptome datasets from rice and mouse. Using as our benchmarks the known transcripts from these well-annotated genomes (sequenced a decade ago), we assessed how SOAPdenovo-Trans and two other popular transcriptome assemblers handled such practical issues as alternative splicing and variable expression levels. Our conclusion is that SOAPdenovo-Trans provides higher contiguity, lower redundancy and faster execution. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code and user manual are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/soapdenovotrans/.