Video games have grown into the largest entertainment industry, generating over $200 billion in annual revenue. Modern games are not only massive in scale but also highly complex systems, composed of interconnected components such as graphics and rendering systems, AI systems, and physics simulations. This complexity makes building these games a monumental task—and testing them an even greater challenge.

Today, game testing still heavily relies on manual processes, as automation remains difficult to implement. The interactive and stochastic nature of games, combined with their sheer size and the vast number of configurations to verify, makes automating tests inherently challenging. As a result, manual approaches often struggle to scale with the growing size of games and the rapid pace of development cycles. In addition, developers face overwhelming demands when triaging the thousands of issues uncovered during testing and reported by players, further complicating the process.

In this keynote, I will explore how automation is steadily transforming game testing and triage, alleviating some of these challenges. Drawing from both research and industry practices, I will showcase techniques that are improving testing workflows and enhancing issue triage. I will also discuss current limitations and highlight opportunities for the software engineering community to address the gaps that remain.

Bio: Sarra Habchi is a Principal R&D Scientist dedicated to advancing software quality and reliability, with a focus on software testing, continuous integration, and automation. She leads the software engineering research group at Ubisoft La Forge, driving innovation in quality engineering to address the unique challenges of the video game industry. She holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Lille, where her research focused on mobile-specific code smells and their impact on mobile app quality.