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

The difference between dev and live ops

There is a lot of misunderstanding about live ops. It’s a relatively new part of the development cycle, which became increasingly important with the rise of free-to-play games. Traditional games are made in the following life cycle, shown in Figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1 – Premium game high-level development cycle

Figure 11.1 – Premium game high-level development cycle

Practically 90 percent of the work is done before the game is published. After the game is out and released to the target market, there might be some additional content available for purchase (called DLC) or some major bug fixes. Of course, there will also be the possibility for player to reach player support. However, we will consider development work is done when the game hits the market. The game team that worked on the game is either redistributed to other game development projects or let go. Premium game development is somewhat similar to creating feature movies. The team gets together, spends...