With Agile Game Development Methodology, developers can concentrate on delivering new features, add-ons, enhancements, and bug fixes. As part of wrong practices, especially in the mobile game testing, the QA testing process takes place at a later stage. On the other hand, a steady quality for faster game delivery and testing in the production phase is critical to achieve quality video games in the end.
In this blog, we are going to see some aspects related to the Agile Game Development model and involvement of QA right from the early stages.
VIDEO GAMES TESTING & DEVELOPMENT:
Video game development is a complex procedure comprising multiple disciplines, conflict of thoughts, team coordination, etc. The game development cycle consists of six major stages like ideation, pre-production, production, Quality Assurance, launch, post-launch. There is no particular methodology or model set for the game industry however many companies have adopted agile development models.
AGILE DEVELOPMENT:
The Agile development model has emerged as a new approach to provide new structure, definition, and value to the process and to combat issues like constantly changing requirements, working with customers, testing issues and so on. In an agile development process, one has to readily accept the changes, work according to the changes and consider enhancing customer value through collective components that contribute to the entire process of game development.
A lot many benefits of adapting agility: how an agile process copes up with the rapidly happening market changes making it easy for the entire system to update without affecting the current workflow. It helps to lower down defect rates, improve product quality, and enhancement of product produced. Different companies use different agile methods like Scrum, XP ( Xtreme Programming), Kanban, etc.
- SCRUM: Can be defined as an agile framework that can help people to define complex adaptive problems. It mainly consists of three pillars like roles such as product owner, scrum master, Artifacts such as sprint and product backlog, and ceremonies like daily scrum meetings.
- XP: The set of XP models includes stories, cross-functional teams, continuous integration.
- Kanban: It is based on three major principles that are visualizing workflow, limit the work in progress, and measure the lead time.
HOW TO ADD TIME TO AGILE DEVELOPMENT?
Optimum benefits of testing can be seen with a well structured & systematic approach, better test automation tools when applicable, and strong integration with agile development processes. Test case creation and automation script writing can be performed when there is no development going on. Instead of fixing bugs at a later stage in development, it is great to fix them during early testing to save a lot of time. Also, the developer is notified about the new code problems and issues, and once fixed it’s pushed in the ongoing sprint without any delay.
SOME TESTS THAT CAN BE DONE DURING DEVELOPMENT:
Below are some agile game testing methods:
- Smoke Testing: Smoke Testing with the help of automatic test exercisers provides a great way to test the visual aspects of a game such as clicking buttons, opening menus, swipe controls, etc. It delivers faster result on each iteration
- Regression Testing: Regression Testing is done to ensure that the quality of the game is not compromised upon code changes or due to code changes or upon addition to any new feature. It is rigorously tested on different platforms and devices as applicable to check the game’s consistency.
- Connectivity Testing: If you are building a game that has features such as upload/download/login, you need to make sure that the code doesn’t break the functionality of the game.
- Performance Testing: Specialized tools can record the performance-based parameters of a game that can save you from creating a bad impression under a certain load of end-users or gamers. Developers can check for all the performance issues including but not limited to loading time, speed, graphics, battery consumption and optimize it accordingly.
- Functional Testing: Functional testing to cover the core gameplay objectives, logical issues and anything that goes outside the expected behavior from the end-user perspective in general.
CONCLUSION:
Agile methodology in video game development and QA can help to overcome resource utilization related issues and make best use of the time and funds of your video game development studio. Many companies have adopted the scrum agile method for systematic and wee defined execution processes in the games industry. Agile methods can help to adapt to the industry changes happening without disturbing the entire code which can otherwise get messy and require more effort.
