FZ!

In the game industry, the role of the Quality Assurance Tester is a very complex one. At first glance, you are inevitably on the lower rungs in the industry ladder - little known and less liked, and consigned to a faceless chunk of credits hidden at the end of the game, after the art interns and just before the development babies. And yet, ask any experienced game producer, and they’ll tell you that QA is a vital and often underestimated part of releasing a polished product.

This seems like the right time to admit a certain bias in viewpoint. I’m a tester, and I’m proud of it.

It’s easy to understand the general disdain towards testers. Their job is to go through the game and find everyone else’s problems. After pulling a grueling 80+ hour week, no one is going to react well to being told they left a critical bug in the latest build. And yet, the tester’s job requires they do exactly that, compiling hundreds of problems – large, small, and miniscule – that have slipped by programmers, artists, and designers on all levels. People outside of the industry think testing is like playing games all day, but it’s much more like being a proofreading editor. Except without the respect.

To make matters worse, testers are often the least known members of a game development team. Many developers contract out their QA work to companies they may never have met, and even the developers with in-house testers don’t tend to be on a first-name basis with more than half of them at any given time. It can be especially hard to keep up to date as a project nears the end of its development cycle, because that’s when a QA department tends to shore up its forces by hiring handfuls of temps to handle the workload. And many of these temporary testers are college or high-school gamers full of ambition and attitude, but all-too-often lacking in other little areas like professionalism or tact.

Life in a game house’s offices may be rowdy and informal, but it’s teatime with the queen compared to the joking in a crowded room full of unruly QA temps. And when you’ve got a dozen new kids pointing out your mistakes with the attitude that they could do better, it’s no wonder the collective group is almost-affectionately known “miscreants”. At best.

Still, the testing process is an undeniable step in the development of a game, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who’s played a poorly-tested game. From the constant minor bugs found in the later stages of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance to game-stoppers like the recent Bubble Bobble Bug, releasing a game with insufficient testing is like sending off a drunken email to your girlfriend without proof-reading it in the morning. Maybe it just had a few typos, and you didn’t insult her too much, but you’ll definitely be hearing about every little mistake… if she bothers to respond to you ever again.

Close communication between testers and the rest of the team can make a huge difference in the efficiency of the testing, and there’s a suite of skills that dedicated testers should develop to improve this communication, as well as the respect they receive from the other developers in their company. Of course, even the most professional QA tester will still be seen as one of the lowest positions in the game development world. But there are worse things than being seen as one of the miscreants.

They could be as disrespected as tech-support.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 12:05 am and is filed under QA, Big Bugs, Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.