Concordia develops tool with Ubisoft to detect glitches in gaming software

MONTREAL — Concordia University says it’s partnered with video game studio Ubisoft Montreal on a project to streamline the game development process.

The university says researcher Wahab Hamou-Lhadj and his team have developed an artificial intelligence system that automatically identifies coding defects as programmers write them.

Concordia says Hamou-Lhadj and his team had access to a decade’s worth of code from the company, which they used to find patterns in bugs and fixes that can now be used to warn programmers about similar mistakes.

Hamou-Lhadj says the tool, developed with Ubisoft’s La Forge research and development unit, could reduce development times by as much as 20 per cent.

He says the time spent correcting defects represents thousands of expensive work-hours, with software maintenance accounting for about 70 per cent of the whole software life cycle.

Concordia says the system, called Commit Assistant, will make games less likely to crash but could also be used in a wide range of software development scenarios outside the gaming industry.