On the Monday of week 8 we were visited by guest speaker and QA Analyst at Rocksteady Studios Georgia Mae Ayling to shine a light on the world of QA and what it means to work in QA for games.

So what is QA?

We can define QA as the act of ensuring that the thing your making is meeting a standard desired level of quality at every stage of the process. More specifically, QA includes:

• Finding and reporting bugs
• Usability testing
• Documentation
• Verifying bug fixes
• Writing, maintaining and running test cases

There are a multitude of roles within QA that often times overlap but always serve a very important purpose in the development of games, including (but not limited to) localisation testing, compliance testing and specialist field testing.

Design issues (usability issues)	Bugs
Is the game playable to someone who has never played the game before? Examples: Unclear objective, Narrative issues Confusing visuals, Inconsistencies	A defect in the software. Code does not function as it should. Examples: Crashes, Performance issues, Cosmetic issues, Functional game flow issues, Certification/compliance/legal issues
What does testing for design changes look like? – Watching someone play the game – Giving as little pre-amble information as possible – Taking detailed notes – Asking questions	What does testing for bugs look like? – Try everything possible to ‘break’ the game – Not playing the game normally – Try to account for every scenario the game will be played in

Players may do something a certain way because that is what the game is communicating and not what you intend. You always want to be asking why. Why did they enjoy it, why did they do that, why do they think that, why is there a struggle?

She would also come sit with us to learn about our games and offer further tailored advice.

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Feedback & Advice

When we were greeted by Georgia, I explained our team’s goals following our first playtest – the steps we planned to take and our progress. She was super impressed with the work we had done in preparation and in execution of our first playtest, praising our bug report sheet and notes.

One of the things we were aiming to improve was intuitiveness, we planned to do this by implementing a tutorial. Georgia suggested we look at testing things at a smaller scale to focus on improving/fixing our biggest hurdles. In our case this could mean having players just play through the tutorial and observing the success of that, then tailoring our form to measure other factors like overall enjoyability, difficulty, or effectiveness of visuals/sound.

Narrowing down the areas of testing hadn’t even crossed my mind but it would greatly help zone in on specific feedback. This would especially helpful for me and my work with the UI.