⋅─⊱✧✧✧⊰─⋅
Monday 17th March
Testing in games development
Today we had guest speaker Georgia Mae Ayling, a QA Analyst at Rocksteady Studios come to class to talk to us about QA testing in games development.
What is QA– Quality assurance. Insuring what you have made is of a desired level of quality, at every stage of the process.
Responsibilities of a QA Analyst:
- Build verification
- Document processes
- Finding and reporting bugs
- Usability testing
- Writing, maintaining and running test cases
- Develop testing tools
- Verifying bug fixes
What is quality assurance in the context of making games?
- Functional testing –
- Generalised QA testing
- Playthrough testing
- Smoke testing
- Localisation testing –
- Fluent in multiple languages
- Checks the game makes sure linguistically and culturally makes sense
- Checks dialogue, text, numbers and dates are correctly localised.
- Compliance testing –
- Checks the game meets regulatory standards set by first party platforms.
- Dev QA –
- Supports QA teams with testing
- Supports design teams with troubleshooting
- Can act as a connection between QA and other development teams
- Can establish process and guidelines for wider testing.
- Specialist field testing –
- Engine/performance
- Design systems
- Network
- Game specific elements
- Animation
- Audio and more.
- SDET – Software development engineer in test –
- Writes, develops and manages automated testing.
Design changes vs Bugs
| Design issues/ usability | Bugs |
| Is the game playable to someone who has never played the game before? Examples of issues may include: ✧ Unclear objectives ✧ Narrative issues ✧ Confusing visuals ✧ Inconsistencies | A defect in the software. Code does not function as it should. Examples of issues may include: ✧ Crashes ✧ Performance issues ✧ Cosmetic issues ✧ Functional game flow issues ✧ Certification / Compliance / Legal issues |
A QA team can help identify both things.
What does testing for user feedback look like?
Testing for design changes:
- Watch someone play the game
- Give as little pre-amble information as possible
- Take detailed notes
- Ask questions
What does testing for bugs look like?
Testing for bugs:
- Try everything possible to ‘break’ the game
- Don’t play the game normally
- Try to account for every scenario the game will be played in
What are the limitations of testing your own work?
- You know what you’ve made
- Giving yourself honest feedback is hard
- Scale of resources
- Training yourself to think differently:
- Designer
- Player
- Player who has never played games
Advice for testing your own work:
- Set your quality gate and stick to it – the standard you want to achieve with this product.
- Break it down into sections – focus on one feature at a time, giving you a better chance of finding all the bugs.
- Get feedback on your product
- Every game ships with bugs – disaster planning ahead.
Advice for working with a QA team:
- Document your work clearly – the more information the better
- Test your work before you submit
Georgia’s talk was very useful and relevant to what both the team and I have been working on recently – The playtest and my camp survey.
⋅─⊱✧✧✧⊰─⋅
UI, Tutorial, Intuitiveness. just test small sections of the game.
Thursday – presentations
Reply