Modern game testing: learn how to test games professionally, optimise testing effort and skyrocket your QA career

Implement modern and agile QA practices to ensure your games are high quality, on budget, and released on time.

Key Features

• Implement modern QA strategies to ensure your games are bug-free and on budget
• Learn how to build efficient QA teams either in-house or remotely
• Increase your chances of career advancement and your employability in the gaming industry

Book Description

There are few things more annoying for gamers than for their new game to be buggy. This in turn leads to bad reviews, and you'll find that no one wants your games anymore. What you need is better QA. But how?

Modern Game Testing will show you how. Whether you're a new developer or a production manager, 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, importantly, on budget.

Once you've been introduced to QA and the various types of tests that are performed on games, you'll explore test cases and bug reporting, building tests for different platforms (even consoles and PCs), and live ops and test management. You'll learn how to build a QA team from scratch and work with remote QA testers. You'll look at the lessons learned from more traditional QA approaches and then examine the modern agile approach and the various testing strategies you can 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 the book, you'll have a clear understanding of the modern methodologies of QA testing for games, and you'll be able to build efficient, reliable, and long-lasting QA teams.

What you will learn

• Conduct compliance, regression, and localization tests, among others
• Build and optimize test sets for mobile games testing
• Set up an efficient bug flow
• Write optimal bug reports that differentiate priority and severity
• Pick the optimal testing approach for each phase of game development
• Use equivalence partitioning, boundary analysis, and decision tables
• Implement live ops QA to handle live bugs
• Build a modern QA team from scratch

Who This Book Is For

This book is for game testers, game producers, game developers, testing managers, and other QA professionals who want to learn more about modern approaches to QA and use them to build more efficient and cost-effective QA teams and products. It is desirable that the reader has prior professional testing experience, either in software or games testing and/or experience working in the gaming industry. Basic familiarity with agile working practices such as scrum is needed to fully understand all concepts explained in the book.

Table of Contents

1. Setting the stage: Introduction to QA
2. All engines go: Games QA basics
3. Deeper look: Types of testing in games
4. Deeper look: Testing on various gaming platforms - Mobile, PC and console
5. It must be hardware: Testing hardware in modern games QA
6. Friend or a foe: test cases
7. It works on my machine: Bug reporting flow
8. I thought I fixed that: How to write efficient bug reports
9. It works, but it hasn't been tested: Testing approach
10. Eat, Sleep, Test, Repeat: QA Methodology
11. Are you on the right version: QA and live ops
12. Beyond testing: Introduction to test management
13. There are no BUGS without U: QA and games team
14. Future of game testing