|
Hello everyone !
Soon, i'll get a lifetime contract for my job as a QA Tester. I'm very happy about it, because this is what I feel I've been made for.
Now I know our work is quite unknown, and has a bad reputation. I'd like to clear things out for everybody who's curious, or interested in doing this job. TL being a huge community, i think some of you might have questions. So fire them!
Projects I worked on at various levels of intensity : - Mars : war logs - Styx : Master of Shadows - Etherium - Magrunner - Blue estate - Constrast - Sherlock Holmes : Crimes & Punishments - Spacerun - Bound by flame - Final Exam - Wargame : Airland battle - Wargame : Red dragon - Farming Simulator 2013 - Farming Simulator 2014 - Farming Simulator 2015 - Tour de france 2013 - Tour de france 2014 - Pro Cycling Manager 2013 - Pro Cycling Manager 2014
I'm under NDA for some stuff but i'll try to answer anything
|
So...tell us what you do.
|
I work for an editor, not a dev studio. My job is to ensure the quality of the games we produce. We receive builds from the prealpha to the retail game (+ patches/dlcs) and we have to identify, reproduce and report bugs to the devs. For that, we use bugtrackers, and we create test plans in order to keep track of what we have tested and what we must test next.
We also do various tasks : recording gameplay for the marketing and Age Rating process, organizing playtests to receive feedbacks from players, hardware tests to make sure the game works fine on every setup, localization check, quality suggestions to the devs, and console requirements in order to be able to sell the title on all the platforms/
As games and devs are almost always differents everytime, every project is a unique case for us
|
lifetime contract ?? please elaborate
|
France1887 Posts
By lifetime contract, I think he means a permanent contract, an indefinite contract. It probably won't last all his lifetime, but the end date of the contract is not defined.
|
Yes I meant that, most probably, sorry for the mistake
|
|
Testing isn't playing of course
Where I am, we're quite free to test games the way we want, we just have to do something useful. The devs sometimes ask us to test features, or it's the Lead QA and Producers that give us tasks, but we have to accomodate them with our own plans in order to be more efficient. There's always something to test, so you're free to do one of the endless things you have to do !
From what I see, testing doesn't seem to be so bad at dev studios either, they don't appear to be much stressed out.
I hope i'll have a good life too, thanks! The only problem so far seems to be the tendinitis after a long period of work..
|
Canada11355 Posts
Without revealing specifics, could you say how much money you make compared to your national average?
Is most of your gameplay "running into walls and jumping into roofs" as my friends in the gaming industry like to call it?
Is there a lot of competition for your job and what makes a good tester vs someone who is just good at games?
|
Sounds fun, i've worked as a QA tester before too, for more monotonous software than games though so you are lucky. My question is, do you think you'll ever get bored about the job and whats your favorite part about it? Why QA and not something else?
|
Sidenote: If you work for Cyanide, please make sure there next Blood Bowl iteration doesn't suck ass like the current....
|
So, is one of the things you do mash buttons in menus? And is another one of the things you do go into a corner and jump a bunch?
|
ahh ok
we just have to do something useful.
Please elaborate on some examples
|
On October 08 2014 05:51 Nyarly wrote:Testing isn't playing of course Where I am, we're quite free to test games the way we want, we just have to do something useful. The devs sometimes ask us to test features, or it's the Lead QA and Producers that give us tasks, but we have to accomodate them with our own plans in order to be more efficient. There's always something to test, so you're free to do one of the endless things you have to do ! From what I see, testing doesn't seem to be so bad at dev studios either, they don't appear to be much stressed out. I hope i'll have a good life too, thanks! The only problem so far seems to be the tendinitis after a long period of work.. Can you clarify on this please? Who is they?
|
Do you read The Trenches?
It sounds like a horrible profession tbh... why would you accept a lifetime contract?? Or you mean a once in a lifetime contract?
|
Without revealing specifics, could you say how much money you make compared to your national average? I make a bit more than the national average for a single person. Quite nice if you ask me.
Is most of your gameplay "running into walls and jumping into roofs" as my friends in the gaming industry like to call it? When I see a situation where I think I can exploit the collision system, I do that. But that's not at all what we do all day. Most of the time, we're doing walkthroughs with a defined path : tester1 speed run, tester2 normal run with full objectives, tester3 slow run try to break the game, ..
Is there a lot of competition for your job and what makes a good tester vs someone who is just good at games? Not a lot of people truly want to work as a QA Tester. Most of the time, we have game designers, or level designers, that didn't find a better offer, and spend their internship as QA Testers, in order to have their first experience in the video game industry. It's actually very good to do that because as a tester (atleast where I work), you get to work with everyone involved in the process of making a video game. You learn a lot very quickly. As for good testers, I made my internship paper with this question. Basically, to me, everyone is different, everyone will test something differently, and there are no useless tests, so everyone's useful. => a gamer will make sure the game can be played entirely without any major issues => a "true" tester will make sure the game won't be broken after a misusage
Sounds fun, i've worked as a QA tester before too, for more monotonous software than games though so you are lucky. My question is, do you think you'll ever get bored about the job and whats your favorite part about it? Why QA and not something else? I don't know about this, I might indeed get bored somedays, but i've doing this for 1.5 years and i'm still happy when I find bugs. That's also why I love testing. I've spent 5 years exploring WoW, meaning going through walls and exploiting bugs in order to discover hidden places. When I play a game, I usually try to find outmaps and bugs, that's where I get the fun of playing video games I did 4 years in computer science before that, as a student. If I don't test, I'll probably be a programmer instead. But I always loved the debug part the most when I was coding, and from what I see, testing is still funnier than programming.
Sidenote: If you work for Cyanide, please make sure there next Blood Bowl iteration doesn't suck ass like the current.... I'm not assigned to this project (and i don't love the randomness in it), but our guys are doing the best they can. They know the community has high expectations
So, is one of the things you do mash buttons in menus? And is another one of the things you do go into a corner and jump a bunch? Yes, i'm one of those guys that love to mash buttons, and also love to find bugs with it. But most of the times, these issues aren't considered as a major, as it is not an expected behaviour (people that will find these bugs did force the issue). Too bad, because I found an unlimited gold exploit on of the games we released I also love to jump everywhere and find outmaps, that's what i'm good for really.
Please elaborate on some examples Testing collisions, walkthroughs to make sure there are no blockers, achievements unlocking, switching languages to check the localization, saving/loading/exiting at different occasions to make sure the game is stable, unplugging the controller to check the warning, ... Really, the only useless thing you can do is testing again what another tester did before you on the same build (in the same way).
Can you clarify on this please? Who is they? QA Testers / Devs / Producers I work with
Do you read The Trenches?
It sounds like a horrible profession tbh... why would you accept a lifetime contract?? Or you mean a once in a lifetime contract?
I don't know The Trenches. What makes it horrible to you ? I meant a permanent contract, the company hired me for an unlimited time, until I decide to quit.
Sorry for the delay, I hope my answers are satisfying !
|
so how did you get that job? do you have a college degree or did you just apply more or less randomly?
|
On October 09 2014 14:58 virpi wrote: so how did you get that job? do you have a college degree or did you just apply more or less randomly?
Since there aren't any degree for testing, I decided to get whatever degree I could get, that was related to video gaming. I applied before at Ubisoft, but I was too young and unexperienced to obtain a job.
In France, after spending 2 years in a public college, you're allowed to make another year in a professionalising cursus in order to have a job faster. (or stay in the same cursus for another 3 years) That's what I did, in order to obtain a degree in level design in only one year. At the end of the year, we had to make an internship. A guy told me about a friend of him that did an internship as a QA Tester, I decided to apply, and I got the job. My boss was impressed by my performances and offered me another contract two months after the end of my internship. I was good again, and that's when they decided to offer me a permanent contract.
I'd say it's fairly easy to become a QA Tester, as long as you have a bit of knowledge about the video gaming industry, and as long as you're doing a good job.
|
I think speedrunners would make perfect QA testers. I wonder how many of them are actually involved in it.
|
On October 10 2014 04:16 Capped wrote: I think speedrunners would make perfect QA testers. I wonder how many of them are actually involved in it.
We have one guy that's specialized in speedrunning games. He almost earned a contract completing a RPG in less that 2 hours. That's interesting because he can complete a version in less than a day, and detect most of the obvious blockers and critical issues on the way.
We are also hiring a "professional" speedrunner. The guy is starting on monday, and has a webtv with his speedruns, we look forward to what he can achieve. But as always, the thing with testing is that you can't have everyone that's good at the same thing. Testers have to play games in a different way in order to try differents possibilities.
So yeah, speedrunning is definitely a good thing, but testing isn't all about that. Most of the times, you have to repeat more than once the same action to reproduce an issue, and that takes time.
|
|
|
|