Alistair Wallis interviewed me for an article that just went up over at Game Career Guide. I have to say, it is a lot easier getting thoughts out on this topic when somebody is asking you good questions. Naturally the article also went up on Slashdot.

Click through below for my full interview with Game Career Guide.

> How hard is it to get a job in QA compared to other sectors of development?

It varies depending on what kind of QA job you want, and how many other people are trying to get the same job. If you want what most people think of as testing — pure breakage with bouts of gameplay — that is relatively easy to get at a large publisher or a console manufacturer’s game approval via their contractors. No real education is required for that level of QA, and it shows in the quality of testing. Assuming you are persistent and live near a publisher’s QA farm house, you can get in relatively easily.

A skilled coder, however, can usually get into the door via an entry level position at a large developer, especially if they don’t mind working on menus for budget sports games. Though the barrier to entry is higher for programmers since there is an education requirement, and genuine skill is required and expected to program.

Unfortunately I’m not very knowledgeable about entry into the industry as an artist. I would suspect it is still more difficult than entry-level QA.

For either programmers or artists the best thing to have is experience, especially with an accomplished group of people that have won awards. Most of my friends who have joined the industry directly as programmers did so via the modding community.

> What is the best way to get a job in QA?

If you have a pulse and live near a large publisher, just check out your local craigslist want ads. Make sure to show up with realistic expectations and ideas in your head about the subject at hand. Read up on the subject through blogs like mine, and almost any general software testing book to understand the terminology.

> Do you consider it a problem that a lot of people are using the job as
> a stepping stone? That is, do you think QA can be a worthwhile career
> path?

I think QA could be a worthwhile career path for console and computer games if only it were treated and respected as such. It isn’t and probably won’t be. Game developers and publishers seem to regard QA as an unfortunate expense required in the development process. So to answer your question, yes. It is a problem for anyone who wants to actually focus on it that they won’t be respected for doing so. When you’re asked, “Where you want to be in five years?” The answer is rarely QA. People who do answer this question with QA are regarded as underachievers. Testers must continue with their careers path until they are able to make changes in the field of testing for the better. Many people who I have seen move on from testing, do so at the expense of becoming similar to hazing victims; they move on to treating testers just as poorly as they were treated.

> What would you say the positives of working in QA are? What (in a
> general sense) have you liked about your time working in QA?

The positives of working in QA are seeing games before they’re completed. Testing even the worst game and getting to play it for a few minutes is a fantastic way to spend your time. Most of your coworkers are good people. You’ll generally learn a lot about the different stages of completeness games go through. So it is a great learning experience, and exactly what people need to find out if they’re really going to stick with the game industry career path.

The best thing about any day is seeing a bug get closed that was difficult to reproduce, after I’ve helped to come up with better reproduction steps.

> What are the negatives?

The testing negatives are so easy to find. Repetitive testing on games that you don’t like, and will ship with bugs regardless of how many you file. The frustration of seeing any bug be discovered and ignored. Low pay (I could have been a full time employee with more money sooner than I did if I had worked in any other form of software testing.) Poor treatment from your superiors. Seeing people you like, and who are good at testing, getting fired to lower costs. The worst negative for most people is the ruined dream of working in the game industry, these are the folks who wrote game design documents in school and have great ideas.

> Why do you think people tend to view QA as such a good avenue to get
> into other areas of development?

QA is a good path into other areas since people get a clean reality check on their game industry career path. They either burn out in QA, or move on to another area (coding, production, art, etc). Most game development roles involve problem solving as well, which is one valuable trait that is difficult to come by unless you’ve developed software or tested it.

> Do you see a lot of people starting work with you who have taken the
> job just to work in other areas?

Constantly. I’ve never met anyone whose goal was to continue with QA. Even if it isn’t their immediate goal, good testers will get snatched up into other roles.

> Do you feel that testers are undervalued?

Of all the testing I’ve done, only with my latest job am I paid and treated fairly. So eventually with enough hard work that winnows out those who won’t put up with it, testers can reach a nice enough plateau. However, there will most likely never be a change in the lower level testers’ treatment as long as there is an endless mob of guys who will put up with it and have unrealistic expectations.

> Do you think people underestimate how difficult the job is when
> looking at it as a stepping stone?

People almost always see the goofy ads on TV where “game testers” are sitting in front of a flashing TV screen and just playing as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Most everyone starts out underestimating the job via this idealized testing environment, and some of them never get over it. You’ll see these folks who don’t have any bugs assigned to them, they’re always easy to spot since they appear uninterested in the work. The actual work is interesting and creatively challenging. You must break games in a variety of different ways, and often times you will only be testing one small segment of a game.

When I worked at a console manufacturer’s game approval facility, the other testers in my group and I were testing storage compliance, this had to do with the requirements for any game to get approved for the platform. We would have a list of tests such as filling the memory cards and whatnot. Just like the rest of the folks in compliance, we never really scratched the surface of the ideas regular people have of playing games all day and accidentally coming across bugs.

However, at a place like that you don’t really have the opportunity to do the best part of the work, research and helping fix the bugs you’ve found. The research into testing methods and helping to fix bugs is probably the most crucial and overlooked element of testing. Just as with any job it isn’t the drone that continues to survive, but instead the person that alters the working environment around them. Those that never venture any farther than the QA meat lockers full of testers at large publishers will miss out on the best parts of testing and never know what they were missing, regardless of how challenging those best parts are.

Permanent Link. This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007, authored by admin, and is filed under egoboo, expectedresult. 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.