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Testing things that don't want to be tested: A game streaming story - Amélie Laporte

Gaming is one of the biggest industry on the market and with streaming being one of the most prevalent technology, game streaming is becoming a new important challenge. Indeed, game streaming includes online gaming where the game is played remotely and streamed to the player's devices, shall it be a computer, a mobile or a console. This allows users without powerful hardware to enjoy content. But contrary to other kinds of media, games needs to answer to a player's input with the lowest latency while keeping the best quality possible. But how do we ensure the best experience for the players? In this presentation, we will talk about automated tests and how these can help us answer some problematics tied to game streaming. As cited above, latency and network in general is crucial for a good experience, and because our audience is worldwide, users can experience a wide variety of network conditions. Moreover, the diversity of devices on which a user can play is broad and the specific hardware and software components in each device is even more diverse. So, how can we test thing that don't want to be tested? As there is no out-of-the-box solution to do it, we decided to experiment with common DevOps tools such as Ansible, AWX and ELK. And with these technologies we are able to connect at least 2 Windows workstations and a network emulator to validate, optmize or debug our streaming stack.

December 2, 2022