Testing In the games industry... a thread

No .... it’s not playing games

There are a bunch of different testing roles, there is no one shoe fits all.
You’d actually be really surprised with just how many different roles there are.
I’m going to try and list and explain as many as I can

- Playtesting
- Functionality testing
- Compatibility/ compliance Testing
- Format testing
- Localisation testing
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Dev Testing
- Validation testing
- Automation testing / QA engineer
- TRC

Playtesting :
When certain features are needing feedback, often people are asked to come to the studio to take part in organised play testing.
This is often carried out over a couple of hours and feedback is provided at the end of the session.

This gives developers an idea of if their feature is playing out as it should and it’s normally carried out towards the middle or near the end of the project and is vital :)

Compatibility and compliance:
Testing the feature/ game across different devices. This could be across different consoles or across different mobile devices.
This is to make sure that the end product works in the correct way.

Format Testing:
This tends to be a first party thing. For example Playstation will carry out Format Testing on finished products which have been published to disc (became gold).
They test that it covers all the important checks such as (size/ age rating, TRC, playability)

Format testing often do not see the game in pre development and will always view it in a pre-release state.

Localisation Testing:
This is as you can guess, Testing the game across different languages to ensure that the dialogue matches the subtitles.
It’s also checks to ensure that none of the localised words sound naughty/ rude or incorrect.

These checks are normally carried out by people who speak the language fluently.
Depending on the game it can have up to 10 localisation testers (or more) enduring that everything makes sense and is appropriate.

Quality Assurance:
Carrying out testing plans created by senior testers or test leads to ensure that the development team are creating features which are working as intended.
It is not always playing through the game and looking for bugs.
Although bug capturing is important

Quality Control:
I’m going to be honest with you QA and QC can vary depending on the company that you are working for. Tests can be more intense in this section.

A typical testing day can be
- Smoke test (ensuring the most recent dev build is safe to be passed to testing studios)
- Performance Checks (checking where the performance drops across different consoles within particular sections)

- Dev tests (this is ensuring that a massive change from a developer which could potentially break the entire game, is checked before it enters the main build)
- Editor checks (checking the Navmesh - cover - vaults - player collision - dynamic collision - material collision -

Lighting - performance - streaming - validation)
- Testing in the same space where developers are working, really helps to capture the problems before they enter the main game.
It’s also a great way in helping designers with their scripts and artists with their created models.

Validation testing:
- This is such an important job for artists.
- it requires a number of different stages to ensure that assets have been made correctly.
- Throughout each stage a tester will let the artist know if they have met all the criteria for their asset to be L1

- The same process is carried out across L2 which then makes it final.
- This way, it slows down the rate in which bugs are put in against assets being incorrect and ensures that they are created to high standards.

Automation testing:
- these guys scare me
- They create ways of testing the game through automation.
- Recently at Ubisoft Reflections we had a couple of guys automate bots to explore the open world. They ran this every night. It helped to uncover areas where you can escape ..

And it helped identify performance hiccups or areas where the Living world system seemed a little off.
- without Automation testers/ engineers that make this stuff. We would need so MUCH more time to test with MORE people. In games development this is hard to get.

TRC-
This is the Technical requirements checklist.
I think (I could be wrong) that this is just a PlayStation thing?
These technical requirements are issues which MUST be fixed for the final game or it will not pass submission.

And with that .... I leave you with testing in the games industry!
There are more roles, and they can probably be explained better.
I just wanted to give you a quick ... TESTING IS NOT ALWAYS PLAYING THE GAME ;)