Integration testing in Bevy, a Rust-based ECS game engine

Abstract

Automated testing in the games industry is trailing traditional software development. This leads to more effort spent on manual testing and more bugs in released games. Interviews with the Finnish games industry and a survey of the Bevy community support the hypothesis that this is an issue of lacklustre tooling. A testing toolkit called BITT was developed to test if that would solve the problem and provide adequate tooling. The survey and insights gained while building BITT indicate that it did not and that the specific tools that will fix the problem may not even be a testing tool. It could turn out to reduce the need to test with other validation methods. For example, the Rust programming language with its strict compiler offers some guarantees about the code without any test implementation work. The ECS game engine architecture seems to have a positive impact on the perception of testing and may also serve as a valuable tool.