This post is to help lend some insight into valuable skills that a successful game tester might need to master. A game tester may go by several different names. In some studios they might be called a Quality Assurance Agent while in others they might be called a Testing Engineer. Their role however is very similar and a vital part to the release process.
During this post let’s dive into some valuable skills that a Quality Assurance agent will need to master in order to be successful at their job. Personally it always drove me nuts when people sit out necessary skills and keep them very generic like, “good communication skills” or “attention to detail”. Those skill definitions are all relative and can mean hundreds of different things. In this post we will try to take a little bit more of a direct approach of exactly what kind of skills you will be sing in your day to day life.
Written and Oral Communication When Reporting Issues
As a Quality Assurance agent you primary focus is to test a product, find defects and report upon those defects. How well you are able to convey exactly what the defect is and how you triggered the defect, can very well mark the difference between getting a promotion or not. a Quality assurance agent has good communication when they are able to describe their exact scenario for reproducing a particular issue For example, they will provide the device information, exact steps on which buttons were pressed and well as information on what they expected to see happening. If additional clarification is needed, the ticket owner might ask for more details in which the quality assurance agent should be prepared to explain the issue in a verbal sense as well.
Think Beyond Test Plans
In most cases a Quality Assurance agent will be following some sort of test plan. These are identified routines that test the most important aspects of the product. As a Quality Assurance agent, don’t be afraid to think outside the test plan and to try things from different or unique angles. Provided of course that it does not jeopardize your time commitments. This type of testing is often referred to as destructive testing. Destructive testing is a type of testing where the Quality Assurance agent purposefully tries to break the app as if they were the user. Although it is critical to follow a test plan during a planned release cycle. Destructive testing can be very valuable to identify issues that live outside the test plan.
Judge Risk - Release Deadlines or Extra Testing
One of the most common battles Quality Assurance agents have to face is time. This is for a good reason. The primary responsibility of a Quality Assurance agent is to find as many flaws and bugs as possible in the product. If allowed - they could take months or longer to do this. However Quality Assurance agents are only given a limited amount of time and are told to find as many flaws as possible in the time allowed. This is a difficult task and requires critical time management skills as well as the ability to judge risk.
When it comes to time management, pay attention to the coverage matrix. In most cases you will have a task list of x number of things to do in a product. Let’s assume that you have steps 1-100. In addition, you have 5 different devices to test these 100 steps on. Which means that you actually have 500 tasks to complete. Now let’s assume that it takes 2 hours to complete the 100 steps on 1 device. That means that it will take 10 hours to complete all of the testing. What do you do if you are only allowed 4 hours to test the product.
This is what the time management skill means to Quality Assurance agents. They have understand the risk of the items being tested. When they only have limited amount of time, Quality Assurance agents need to test the highest risk items first and then move onto other things.
In this example of having 10 hours of testing to complete and only 4 hours to complete it in, many Quality Assurance agents would take the following route. At least each item needs to be tested once, so the Quality Assurance agent would do a full pass test on the their most popular device, consuming approx 2 hours of time. The remaining 4 hours would then be broken up into four 30 min segments. Each of the remaining 4 major devices needs a quick pass to test major functionality. So even those these 4 devices will not get a complete test, they will at least get their most critical items tested.
Provide Value to the Team
Lastly, I want to talk about the notion of providing value back to the team. My intent is not to sound harsh, but the economics of the Quality Assurance agent is that there are generally more Quality Assurance agents available then their are open positions. This means that your position can often easily be replaced and that a company can be a little more selective in their hiring techniques. To help prevent yourself from falling into a pool of unnoticed workers, make yourself stand out by highlighting to those on your team what kind of value you bring to the table.
As a Quality Assurance agent the biggest value you can bring is in being able to work well with the other developers, artists and product managers. Don’t be afraid to solicit feedback from them on how you write up your tickets, communicate issues or other aspects of your job. If they see you making changes that improve the team and their workflows, you will immediately stand out as a valuable team asset.
Always work to improve your workflow and that of others. For most people on the team, the workflow can be the biggest pinpoint that they have to deal with. Look for ways that you can record your tickets and bugs in a fashion that helps to speed up the design, development or release procedures. Modern day ticket tracking systems can be very complex and the better you familiarize yourself with the tools your company uses, the faster you will be able to work.
