Code Impact Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries Constructing a Multidisciplinary Dependency Graph and Analyzing Cross-Boundary Impact

To produce a video game, engineers and artists must iterate on the same project simultaneously. In such projects, a change to the work products of any of the teams can impact the work of other teams. As a result, any analytics tasks should consider intra- and inter-dependencies within and between artifacts produced by different teams. For instance, the focus of quality assurance teams on changes that are local to a team differs from one that impacts others. To extract and analyze such cross-disciplinary dependencies, we propose the multidisciplinary dependency graph. We instantiate our idea by developing tools that extract dependencies and construct the graph at Ubisoft-a multinational video game organization with more than 18,000 employees. Our analysis of a recently launched video game project reveals that code files only make up 2.8% of the dependency graph, and code-to-code dependencies only make up 4.3% of all dependencies. We also observe that 44% of the studied source code changes impact the artifacts that are developed by other teams, highlighting the importance of analyzing inter-artifact dependencies. A comparative analysis of cross-boundary changes with changes that do not cross boundaries indicates that cross-boundary changes are: (1) impacting a median of 120,368 files; (2) with a 51% probability of causing build failures; and (3) a 67% likelihood of introducing defects. All three measurements are larger than changes that do not cross boundaries to statistically significant degrees. We also find that cross-boundary changes are: (4) more commonly associated with gameplay functionality and feature additions that directly impact the game experience than changes that do not cross boundaries, and (5) disproportionately produced by the same team (74% of the contributors are associated with that team).