[casual_games] QA / Bug / Beta testing process

[Peter Nicolai]

Hi,

Somewhat in the vein of the discussion about production & project
management tools from a few weeks ago, I'd be curious to hear what
people are doing in the way of QA.  We've done things a variety of
different ways depending on the project - often relying on ourselves
(programmers, designers, artists etc. - we don't have any dedicated QA
people at the moment) or interns to test along the way, occasionally
bringing in small groups of testers for short periods towards the end
of a project.  We also sometimes rely on feedback from the more
dedicated QA teams of publishers, clients or portals when applicable,
but we'd like to formalize our internal QA a bit more, for general
process reasons as well as for when those kinds of external resources
aren't available.  I know there are dedicated game-QA companies out
there, but I'm not sure how well-suited they are to casual-games
development cycles and budgets.  On the other hand, maintaining a pool
of part-time QA people is tricky, and there often isn't enough of a
workload for full-time QA.  Any thoughts?

In terms of tools, we're mainly using Trac, which we're pretty
satisfied with, although if we could find a bugtracker with a decent
interface that supported pipelined tasks well, we'd probably switch to
that.

--Peter Nicolai