Q.
What’s been the biggest challenge that QA teams have had to face in recent years?
Neil Soane (Quantic Lab): Being applicable. By that I mean fitting into the development or publishing pipelines and still providing meaningful feedback on both quality and quantity. Long gone is the time when a QA team could be engaged at a fixed stage of development and know their role would be done just before release. With games-as-a- service, ongoing DLC and patching the profile of a game’s release is now stretched out over many months.
Steph McStea (Double Eleven): Being welcomed in dev spaces has been a big challenge for QA for a long time, and sadly this continues to be the case in a lot of dev environments. There are still studios who deny QA access to various floors of the building so they cannot mix with other devs, where they aren’t counted as part of a dev team, and are often left out when it comes to conferences and gaming events. This is getting better – slowly but surely – but it is a painfully common issue that a lot of QA teams still face on a day to day basis.
Adam Rush (Keywords Studios): QA, the craft, is often seen as a stepping stone into some other facet of video game development. It’s increasingly hard to keep great talent in QA because people don’t see a career there - and the expertise and knowledge of good QA practices are then diminished as great talent moves into other sectors of the games industry. Companies should treat their QA production teams as important as they do any other department, putting resources behind these teams to not only reward their fantastic work, but also incentivise them to stay on.
Tarek Nijmeh (PTW): The rise of online and multiplayer features and cross-compatibility has added new dimensions of complexity to the testing process. This requires QA teams to not only test the game itself, but also the underlying network infrastructure and online services. Another challenge for QA teams is the growing expectation for games to be bug- free and highly polished at launch. This can be tricky for QA, especially considering the fast- paced nature of the industry and the pressure to release games quickly and frequently.
Erik Hittenhausen (Testronic): We are seeing an unusually long tail end to the last console generation, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One formats. This may be due to the lack of stock of the newer consoles due to the global chip shortages, but it has meant that adoption of the new platforms hasn’t been as quick as we’ve seen in the past. There is usually a period of overlap with games being created for both the old and new console formats, but that period has been quite protracted in this generation. From a QA perspective, that has created an added challenge in areas such as compliance testing as, ultimately, we’re working on four platforms for a game instead of two.
Adriano Rizzo (Payload Studios): I sometimes feel that Early Access has given some developers the perception that there’s no need to hire full-time testers when you can get players to do it for free. There’s no replacement for a dedicated QA embedded in the dev team - very few players can spend the time hunting accurate steps for bug reproduction, and working directly with the dev team gives you added insight into how the game works at the design and code level.
“It’s increasingly hard to keep great talent in QA because people don’t see a career there.”
Adam Rush, QA partnership manager at Keywords Studios February 2023 MCV/DEVELOP | 41
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