Book Image

Modern Game Testing

By : Nikolina Finska
Book Image

Modern Game Testing

By: Nikolina Finska

Overview of this book

Few things are more annoying for gamers than encountering a buggy new game. This often leads to negative reviews, and in turn, you’ll find that demand for your games declines. The solution lies in better quality assurance (QA) – and Modern Game Testing will show you how to achieve just that. Whether you’re a new tester, developer or producer, the QA testing techniques shown in this book, using modern methodologies and the latest technology, will have you releasing quality games that are on time and, most importantly, on budget. The book begins by introducing you to QA and the various types of tests that are performed on games. You’ll then explore test cases and bug reporting, building tests for different platforms (even consoles and PCs), and LiveOps and test management. As you advance, you’ll build a QA team from scratch and work with remote QA testers. The chapters help you take a more traditional approach to learning lessons, enabling you to examine the modern agile approach and various testing strategies that you can then adopt. All angles are covered with oodles of examples, so you’ll have everything you need to implement QA strategies in your organization. By the end of this book, you’ll have a clear understanding of the modern methodologies of QA testing for games, and be able to build efficient, reliable, and long-lasting QA teams.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1: Game Testing Foundation
7
Part 2: Test Strategy and Execution
13
Part 3: Test Management and Beyond

Equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis

Equivalence partitioning is a great method when dealing with different data ranges. It’s not possible to test all possible permutations and values that we have in the game, but we do want to make sure that they work as intended. Using equivalence partitioning, we can significantly shorten the testing time and ensure optimal coverage.

The premise of equivalence partitioning is that we can split testing conditions into parts that can be considered the same. Testing one value from each partition is equal to testing each and every value from the same partition. Let’s look at the following example of this:

Figure 10.3 – Equivalence partitioning

Figure 10.3 – Equivalence partitioning

In the example in Figure 10.3, we can see how equivalence partitioning would work in the case of gun ammunition. Let’s imagine that this specific gun is designed for our new, sci-fi-themed game and that it can hold 100 bullets. We can...