[casual_games] QA / Bug / Beta testing process

[spocilujko at comcast.net]

Hi there!

(Figured I should chime in since I'm the current chair of the IGDA's Quality 
Assurance SIG.)

First, I think its great you're taking QA so seriously as that can sometimes 
really make the difference between a mediocre game and a great game.

As far as outsourcing companies I'd check out here: 
www.igda.org/qa/resources.php (If not remove the /resources.php if I'm tying it 
up wrong and just go to the resources button from the main page.)

There are some great companies out there who I know will work flexibly based on 
the company and the needs.

Also, Peter, feel free to contact me off list so we can chat more in-depthly 
about this and I can see what else I can do to help out!

Sheri


> > At my last job, we used the company iBeta for QA. They were really great 
> > and very affordable. We learned a lot about QA from them, too. I don't 
> > recall how much it was, but our games were very small and we would pay 
> > by the hour. They were really great to work with.
> > 
> > -austin
> > 
> > Austin Haas
> > Pet Tomato, Inc.
> > http://www.pettomato.com
> > 
> > Peter Nicolai wrote:
> > > 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
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Casual_Games mailing list
> > > Casual_Games at igda.org
> > > http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/casual_games
> > > 
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