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

How to test new features

We already covered briefly testing new code in Chapter 10, Eat, Sleep, Test, Repeat: Test Methodology.

Here, we will look at it exclusively from a live ops perspective. In live ops, we generally have four development tracks, as shown in Figure 11.3.

Figure 11.3 – The different types of game updates in live ops

Figure 11.3 – The different types of game updates in live ops

Testing new content

The first development track is about content production. Every successful game in live ops has regular content updates. This provides players with new levels or areas of a game to play. Content usually comes out in cadence, and players learn to expect it at regular intervals. By adding new content, we keep our most loyal players engaged, and the game feels fresh and fun to play. Mature development teams have very well-organized content pipelines that are planned a couple of months ahead. The QA team’s job here is to make sure that new content works as it should and can easily be integrated...