Do you want a QA Testing job really bad? Does the idea of playing games all day and getting paid for it your glamorous dream job? Do you want to see you name in lights with the latest video game hit?

Are you insane?

I’m going to rain on your parade a little bit, but there is sunshine at the end, I promise.

Many schools don’t cover one of the more important jobs in the game industry. If you are in QA Testing (Quality Assurance), odds are, most of development and production hate you, but for some strange reason know deep down they need you. It is a weird love/hate relationship that is way too disposable.

From outside the industry, QA Testing is viewed as a hallowed, sacred job that people would do for free, lick the developers’ shoes, wash their cars, whatever. They think it would just be “so totally awesome” to be a game
tester.

Once you’ve been in QA a few years or so, your view heavily changes to slightly jaded, if not totally bitter. This can happen when you have devs and too many (or cocky, know nothing but take all the credit) producers/management constantly making your job a living hell by managing managers and other musical chair games, when all you’re trying to do is ship a bug free (as much as possible) and fun game.

There are some harsh realities to being a game tester for any type of QA Testing job, like standards, TRCs, TCRs, ESRB/ratings pre-checks, etc. What is often perceived as a “dream job” is often a terrible, life-sucking grind if the whole team and company doesn’t really care about their people and/or shipping a quality game.

It would be great if some changes were made in the way QA is handled in the industry. Quality Assurance. The two words are very ironic with what actual QA Testing jobs are at many companies, and the way they are run.

There are good and bad sides to everything, with exceptions here and there. I’ll try to give you a little perspective from both sides drawn from my experiences and from those I’ve heard from people working at various companies in the industry. It would be great if some changes were made in the way QA is handled in the industry.

The Bad

Long hours – Your weeks will often consist of 50-80+ hours a week in a pointless multi-month grind because the project wasn’t scheduled well. Many companies look down on you if you opt out of overtime, and your co-workers may try to give you peer pressure social jabs, like being in high school again, because you want to have a life outside of work.

Little to no respect – Don’t expect any respect from anyone outside of your QA group and QA Lead(s). The developers won’t give you any, and neither will production. You’d be surprised how naive and ignorant some devs and production team members are that don’t even play games, or have only played them for the last 4 years or less.

Regardless of the long hours that you put in, your determination to find those evil bugs, the ambition and drive you take to do extra things to help the devs and production, you will get minimal to no appreciation to show for it. Many times, production will take credit for what QA team members suggested, created, or found to help the project stay on track.

You are treated as a lower-class being for working in QA. I know many in QA (and interns, but that’s another story) who do some of dev’s and production’s jobs for them.

Low pay – Depending on where you are in the United States, or the world, QA Testing is a low paying gig. You will be above minimum wage, but you can’t really make a career out of it long term. Going rates in the U.S.  are around $8.50-15.00+ an hour.

You can work multiple years in QA, and still not make over $40,000 a year, even with moving up in the chain of command multiple times.

Your employer does not try to make your job easier - There are many ways that your QA job could be improved for efficiency, sanity, and to potentially make the game more stable or fun for players. Do not assume common sense exists.

To report bugs properly, and to get them to the devs immediately so that they can be fixed or assessed quickly, the company must have a solid system in place. This is often not the case.

Don’t be surprised if the multi-million dollar company you work for has you writing your bug report on paper, then researching the DB (database) machine to see if they have been entered already, and followed by entering them on ONE DB kiosk machine for the team. When your team consists of 20+ people all ready to enter and/or research their bugs, this is a terrible and time consuming way to do it.

A better way that some companies do this right is they have a DB machine for each tester, or at least every 3-4 testers, so that the process runs better and faster.

Overtime is called volunteer, but it is implied that it is mandatory. Sometimes people get laid off because of misunderstanding this.

You are a disposable contractor - Many game companies hire QA Testers on cycle with the game project to save costs. That means after the game has shipped, that most times, your contract then ends. From a business standpoint I can understand this.

From a developer standpoint, I think it is very stupid. I would rather have a dedicated full time QA team that knows how to write concise and accurate bug reports, works efficiently and well together, work well with the devs/production, are reliable and get the job done from day one. Instead of having morale crushing disposable members of the team re-invent the wheel every few projects.

Bring the QA Team in as early as possible, and have open communication for everyone involved with the project. People that care about the project and company they work for, it shows in the end product. They won’t care if you don’t care about them.

Don’t ever expect management’s decisions to make sense – That way, when they do make sense, you’ll be surprised!

You may experience some things like:

1)  “A” and “B” (major, important) level bugs being shipped with the game, even though you KNOW players are going to be pissed off and you feel that the quality of the game is poor. Then you hear: “We’ll fix it in a patch later”.

2) The release schedule being pushed up (sooner), even though the QA Team was brought onto the project late and there isn’t enough time to clean up all the bugs.

3) Major gameplay problems not being addressed, just ignored, and then corporate wonders why the game did so badly when it had so much potential.

4) New features being pushed into the game that break other parts of the game, which creates more bugs then expected too late in the dev cycle to get fixed in time.

5) There are so many middle managers between the QA Team and the devs, that resolving some simple bug issues takes days, if not weeks, to get looked at, much less fixed.

Getting your name in the credits may not happen - Even though you have spent months of long hours working on a title, and helped find many gameplay and crash bugs to improve the player’s experience of the game, your name may not make the credits.

Not only does this make it difficult to prove on your resume, it also hurts your morale deeply. Movies list half of a city on their credits covering a huge variety of skills from people who may have only worked 1 day on it. Video games should have the same respect for everyone involved in the creation of the game.

QA is looked down upon by many in the industry – Think of QA Testers as Janitors or Marines. They have to go in to unknown hostile territory to do a job no one else will do and clean up other peoples messes.

Once you are in QA for awhile, and get known as a “QA Guy/Girl”, it is like being a type cast celebrity because of their role on a long-running TV show or hit movie.

It is a dirty job dealing with the egos of production or devs and pointing out their mistakes. Many people don’t like being told they are wrong or have made a mistake. People should get over it. The project is bigger then someone’s ego, so they need to grow up, or leave the company. The team is there to make a fun game for players—many lose sight of that.

There are many in QA Testing that have talents equal to, or surpassing devs and production. The sad thing is, this talent is often overlooked because you, as a tester, are viewed as disposable and/or lower class.

No one bothers checking out the experienced and talented people right under their nose. Then you see non-talented, just-barely-made-it-out-of-school interns getting production or marketing jobs that have absolutely no idea how games are developed, much less play them or have any real development skills.

You will be on the same game for months - Try testing, or playing, the same game 8-16 hours a day for 2-9 months per project and see how much you still like the game. When you have devs and production members of the team being uncooperative and/or negative with the QA Team during the whole project, it can be very disheartening.

It can stress you out beyond belief – This is especially true if you have total dirt-bags for immediate Leads or upper management who yell at you for their bad mistakes when production or executives comes down on them. Add to that production yelling at, or sternly telling you, that you’re doing a bad job because they have to delay the game because they have to fix more bugs (when in fact production decided some bugs wouldn’t be fixed at all until they built up near the end of the project and someone finally  DID decide maybe those bugs really should be fixed after all.) due to procrastinating issues instead of resolving them.

So the circle continues. I better end this part of the list now, to make sure I balance out the good list, heh.

Despite the bad things list, there are good things about QA Testing, even though you may think I have nothing nice to write about it so far. Check in next week to see what I mean in the second part of this series.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 9:36 pm and is filed under RESOURCES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.