Video Game Quality Assurance & Testing Process: Part-1

INTRODUCTION TO VIDEO GAME QUALITY ASSURANCE

Game industries & developers are continuously approached to create attractive and user-friendly online games that could engage and entertain their audience. Bugs or glitches might have a negative impression on the player and sales can be affected. In this blog, we are going to look at different terminologies related to video game quality assurance.

WHAT IS QUALITY ASSURANCE?

Now let us understand what is quality and assurance. Quality is meeting the requirements of your end-users in terms of functionality, design, usability, scalability, robustness and reliability of your online games. Assurance as per the name, assures you of hassle-free usage of the service, product, or in our case video games. Assurance gives confidence to the customers that the game designed is compatible and is free from any redundancy.

WHAT IS VIDEO GAME QUALITY ASSURANCE?

Video game quality assurance is a crucial part of a game development lifecycle. With no quality check and testing, there could be possibilities of unwanted bugs or difficulty in playing the game.

IMPORTANCE OF VIDEO GAMES QUALITY ASSURANCE IN GAME DEVELOPMENT

Game development is a rapidly emerging market with millions of game players and different genres of games. Players are constantly looking out for interesting games online and any game error or bug can immediately impact the player in a negative way. Players might even stop playing your video game due to poor quality graphics or errors. Word of mouth or online reviews can also leave a negative impact on the rest of the audience who are willing to explore your game. This can also lead to poor sales and a negative market reputation.

In such scenarios, it is important to avail of services from a Quality Assurance Team who can check game compatibility and perform mobile app testing to check for any faults in your game on every device. Video game testers implement quality assurance methodologies to test the game before its final release.

EXPECTATIONS OF GAMERS FROM ONLINE GAMES:

1. Gamers expect a convenient user interface. So with proper user interface testing, video game testers can check if the UI is consistent, flexible, and comfortable to use.
2. They don’t like getting stuck in between the game: To overcome bandwidth, freezes, and connection issues, functional, performance, compatibility testing can improve the overall gaming experience.
3. Gamers expect Security: With security testing, one can uncover chances of malware attack or any potential threats to the game by intruders. Some of the risks in online games include player accounts getting hacked or even players exploiting certain security flaws for looting the in-game currency, abuse certain in app purchases or even take unfair advantage of certain bugs to take lead over the others. 
4. Point them towards the right direction: There could be illogical events or interruptions that can give a bad user experience. The gameplay should have a self explanatory navigation system. With proper testing, one can eliminate any logical errors occurring and a player can play the way they want.

HOW IS GAME TESTING DIFFERENT FROM SOFTWARE TESTING?

Game testing involves multiple repetitive testing to ensure bug-free end product. The QA professionals need to study and analyze the game rules and requirements, the entire flow of the game, architecture, file structure, and dependencies. Below are some roles and responsibilities of a game tester:

1. Requirement Classification
2. Identifying system and user requirement 
3. Identifying dependent assets
4. Identify the theme of the game like design, camera view, etc
5. Check if the functional requirements are consistent and comfortable to player

HOW TO DO QUALITY ASSURANCE?

Quality Assurance Testing helps to improve the game development process by making it effective as per quality standards. Quality Assurance has a cycle known as the Deming cycle. This cycle is repeated to ensure the quality of the product is not compromised and after every build the QA professional checks for the processes as per the standard.

Planning phase: Before beginning, planning for game development processes is required to ensure consistent delivery of the end product.

Do phase: In this, development and testing is done. Also, game testers do changes in the processes once they are rebuilt or reopened.

Check phase: In this, the game development processes are monitored, modified, and checked to see whether it meets the requirements of the games industry standards.

Act: Discuss and implement the changes that are required for a smooth flow of game development processes and ultimately the improved quality.

WHAT IS QUALITY CONTROL?

The main responsibility of the QC team is to check if the end product meets the requirement of the clients. Their role is limited to examining the final video game build before it is launched in the market.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN QUALITY CONTROL AND QUALITY ASSURANCE

QUALITY ASSURANCE AND QUALITY CONTROL ACTIVITIES

Here are a few activities that are listed under QA AND QC in video games-

Quality Assurance:

1. Working on Quality Audit
2. Defining the process 
3. Declaring tools needed for the game testing process

Quality Control:

1. Involves testing and detecting bugs
2. Involves thorough inspection of the game build

FUNCTIONS RELEVANT TO QUALITY ASSURANCE:

• Requirement Specification:  This step involves acknowledging a GDD (Game Design Document) along with trial and error data which is used for evaluation.
• Validation Plan:  This step involves a big master plan for the entire system to validate any flaws or illogical situations for video games. Particularly for this is handed over to the resource who are well acquainted with latest trends and standards in the video games industry.
• Test Documentation: This stage involves creation of the roadmap for entire testing, declaring roles and responsibilities for each member in the game studio. This may involve which resource is going to test which section, who is going to fix visual issues, who is going to handle coding errors, who is going to take care of networking related aspects, implementing new suggestions and feedback in the actual gameplay and so on.
• Assuring Good quality Products: One of the functions of quality assurance involves delivering a good quality video game product to the end-user/gamer/player.
• Quality Improvement Plan: This involves plans to polish the quality by ensuring changes recommended in the Quality Audit Report on the latest game build.

CONCLUSION:

The goal of any game studio is to provide its audience with fun and exciting games to play without any interruptions. Conducting video game quality assurance activity helps to test the overall performance of the game as per industry standards and helps you to rectify any flaws in your video game for a bug-free launch in the market.