The QA Tester’s role is one of the most overlooked, yet one of the most important, jobs involved in the process of creating a modern video game. As you may be aware, QA is an abbreviation for Quality Assurance, and is the term used to describe the process of ensuring that a game is a quality product, which means it is as free of bugs, crashes, general usability issues and any other strange flaws that might constitute a possible source of anger or irritation to the player.
The QA Tester is the closest of all to the idea of “playing games all day” that some uninformed people may treat a job in games to be. Whilst technically true, it couldn’t be further from the truth as the job actually entails playing the game in such a way as to purposely cause it to go wrong, and once an error has been found, documenting it and the steps involved in reproducing it so another team member can attempt to fix the problem.
As such, a games QA Tester needs to be skilled in the following areas:-
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A Good Working Knowledge of Games : If the tester has a good idea of how a game is put together, and what kinds of things can cause problems, then they are more likely to be able to find faults in the game in the first place. Good examples of the kind of things that can go unchecked are repeatedly pressing input keys during times such as loading or cutscenes, quitting the game at various points, getting the player character into illegal positions and so on.
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A Methodical Approach : Once a problem has been found the steps required to reproduce it must be determined. This needs the tester to repeatedly try various different approaches to replicating the bug. In some cases this might be simple, but in others there may be a strange intermittent bug that only occurs when, for example, the player enters a particular room and fires their last shotgun shell.
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Ability to Produce Concise Instructions : Having found a problem the tester must enter it into the games bug tracking database with simple step by step instructions on how to get the problem to occur. In some cases attaching a screen shot to the bug report might help.
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Ability to Stay Focused on a Single Problem : Having found an error and having had another team member fix it, the tester must then check that the fix has been a success. This entails following the replication steps again and again to ensure the bug has definitely been addressed. If the bug is something simple, such as a spelling mistake in some text, this might be a simple task, but some bugs might only occur after ten minutes of play, so it can take some time to be sure that the bug has been properly fixed.
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