Quality Assurance

Connect with Quality Assurance

 

WE BELIEVE THAT QA IS A CRITICAL DISCIPLINE IN GAME DEVELOPMENT

 

Meet the Board:

Lindsay.jpg

LINDSAY THACKER
RIOT GAMES

“I’ve always seen QA as a craft that needs to be considered and involved as early as any other discipline. QA is often involved late and in a capacity that separates them from the team or pits them as bug writing machines and bearers of bad news. It’s not about logging as many bugs as possible or being a villain that stomps on someone’s creative work; it’s about advocacy and prevention. A QA mindset is one which advocates for a customer who doesn’t get to see a project until launch day, and which seeks to prevent a painful experience for that customer.”

Nate.jpg

NATE STODDARD
HARMONIX

“The promotion of the idea that the QA perspective and the QA discipline creates real value throughout the entire life-cycle of a project is one that I have seen be true again and again in game development. To better establish a way for QA professionals to develop their skills, share knowledge and incorporate new members into the discipline will continue to demonstrate that from prototyping and ideation to post-launch maintenance, the QA perspective helps create products that are greater than the sum of their parts.”

Rando.jpg

CHRIS RANDO
EPIC GAMES

“Advocating for quality is contagious. It promotes an ownership by everyone involved, and not just by the testing team. That ownership can lead to greater collaboration and trust within a development team, and the launch of a product that keeps the end user experience in mind. I have been lucky enough to see this effect come from QA being present throughout a product’s development cycle, and from post-launch support. I feel our statement really helps evangelize the idea of quality advocacy in all parts of development, and how QA professionals can help lead the way.”

Travis.PNG

TRAVIS LOCKHART
RIOT GAMES

“To me this SIG’s mission is not just about “QA wants to be included early,” it’s about “Let’s work together starting as early as we can to make this the best possible product for our consumers,” and gaining alignment around this ideal can be incredibly powerful. It’s unfortunately common to see QA become a process that takes place so late in so many projects development cycles, but so much time and money could be saved by moving that QA process further upstream. Having lived in both a world where QA is not involved until the very end, as well as being involved from the very start, there’s no contest that having QA involved early and often leads to a wide variety of practices that further instill great quality into the products we develop, and one that makes a significant difference – defect prevention. The more we can utilize preventative QA through things like risk analysis and even educating developers on how much value testing adds even in the earliest stages, the higher quality product you can finish with.”

chelsea.png

CHELSEA CURRAN ADAMS
RIOT GAMES

“When people think about quality and QA – they most often think about testing. While testing is one tool in our toolbox, there is so much more we can do as quality professionals. Add in the complexity, creativity, and boundless nature of video games and we have huge open areas to innovate and create tools, metrics, and practices that traditional QA can be limited by. This group helps promote learning, networking, and comraderie in a profession that has so much opportunity to seize.”

 

Contact

Use this form to contact the IGDA Quality Assurance Special Interest Group.

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.