Slashdot Mirror
Is Bughunting Still A Way Into the Games Industry?
Edge Online is reprinting an article from last month's issue of the British gaming magazine. In the article, Bug Hunt, they look at the role of the modern QA tester. While once a good way to make yourself known to the company's HR staff, it's more and more simply a summer gig between classes for college students. They also discuss the hard working conditions, soul-crushing scheduling, and the public misconception that what a QA tester does involves the word 'play'. From the article: "Anyone with any experience of the QA process will deny the slightest resemblance between testing a game and playing one for pleasure: finding bugs is unmistakably work, and, by common consensus, very dull and repetitive work at that. On top of this, pay is often poor, job security frail, working conditions extreme and recognition hard to come by. So why do it?"
I'd say that there's a better chance to get into the industry if you're a damn good modder, rather than a damn good bug finder.
Counterstrike(HL), Desert Combat(BF42), and Red Orchesta(UT2004) are all examples of this.
Hudson: "Is this going to be a standup open beta programme, or just another bug hunt?"
Gorman: "All we know is that there is still is no contract or schedule with the developer, and that SOE may be involved."
Frost: "Excuse me sir, SOE?"
Gorman: "Guys who made Star Wars Galaxies."
Hicks: "It's a bug hunt."
QA will not be a path to anything but a series of contractor jobs in the majority of the game industry for a number of reasons.
First and foremost is the general value the software culture puts on QA to begin with. In any software environment, QA is frequently looked down upon, or at the very least not seen in the same light of respect and value that development is. This makes the QA position something that can be seen as nonessential to the primary function of the company: writing software.
Obviously, that's incorrect, and anyone who has actually worked with a good QA team will tell you so. Trouble is, there are plenty of bad QA teams, and badly managed projects where the value of QA is not clearly laid out.
In the game industry in general, you have the problems as already laid out: soul crushing work hours, ludicrous release schedules, and a sense that there is always someone waiting to do your job because it's a 'dream job' in the game industry. But that applies for every single game developer too. Or have people so quickly forgotten the EA scandal & lawsuit about the lives of their programmers?
Because most development houses are not their own publisher, they have external dependencies and requirements for quality that they must meet. Someone publishing a game thru Vivendi will hand it off to VU for an acceptance pass based on whatever criteria vivendi have in mind. Publisher's QA groups are probably the worst to work for and offer the least amount of actual outside visibility for the tester, but that's where the jobs are. The majority of QA jobs in studios are going to be reserved for people who have inside contacts or are lifetime career testers that are not trying to 'get into the game industry through qa'. They're in those positions because they're excellent testers who can help the company reach the publisher milestones. In some companies, there isn't even a QA team. The logic goes that the publisher will tell you when your game is good enough to release, and you can always bring in contractors on a temporary basis if you need to.
The real answer as to how to break into the game industry isn't a certificate from Game Design University Of DeVry Technical ITT College, and it isn't trying to get 'any job you can in the industry'. The real answer is to develop people skills. More than any industry I've worked in, the games industry runs on word of mouth and personal references. If someone knows you, you are vastly more likely to be hired than the person with superior skills on paper who doesn't have a personal recommendation.
I worked for QA at a major US developer for 3 years (2 of which in a Sr. position) and I have to say that this article does not exaggerate, If anything it was being nice.
The hours are just as terrible as they say in the article, but unlike in the article after the seven months of non stop crunch hours there was no month off, maybe a few days to a week, then you either got fired or moved to another project to start it all over. The equipment is always substandard and often broken. The working situations are always way too cramped. We went even given cubicles; we worked in long rows of tables pressed up against each other so close that 2 people could back up their chairs at the same time.
Using QA as a stepping stone or entry point is no longer an option at all, from what I have seen. Many developers have a very negative image of the people in QA. Out of the 100 people they hired to test probably about 20-40 are actually talented testers, and less then half of that have development skills. Because of this there has been a growing thought that if you work in QA you don't have the talent needed for development work. I have seen people get turned down from a development jobs purely because they currently worked in QA. If you want to make games, you're better off working any normal full time job and making demos/designs docs in your spare time.
Now that I am no longer working for that developer I have much more family/free time, am able to work on my own projects again, and make nearly twice as much as I did while I was in QA (I'm now working in education)
My suggestion for everyone who ever thought about moving into QA, Don't.
I'm not going to deny that QA is difficult. I started at Access Software and stuck with QA through almost five years at Microsoft Game Studios before saying "fsck it" because of the stress and leaving games for a bit to try my hand at coding.
During my time as a programmer, I learned two things. First, even just spending time testing games helped me learn enough about coding in a performance-critical environment that I was able to carry many of those lessons over into "the real world;" and second, as much as I enjoyed making things, I enjoyed breaking them even more.
So I've returned to QA. Sure, QA is often the scapegoat in case anything goes wrong; QA often has to work shifts that would make sweatshop workers quit; QA rarely receives the recognition due or the compensation necessary...but QA is also one of the most rewarding careers in terms of variety and challenge. Every day, I receive a build and wonder what's wrong with it this time and how can I break it.
When I report something to a developer and see them seethe for an hour on end trying to figure out how they're going to fix it...it makes my heart smile. Those are the moments I live for.
That's why I test.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Several years ago, just before I left my 'proper job' to work in the games industry I was involved in a pretty disastrous software project. The project and companies involved shall remain nameless, but basics of the story will be familiar to alot of people.
We had a small in-house team (9-10 coders) and the business decided to embark on a project which was way outside of the teams' capacity. After several weeks of protesting that the project was too big for us to deliver in anywhere near the drop dead dates we were given management finally relented and brought in a development consultancy to supplement our small internal team. This consultancy (who will also remain nameless) brought with them a small army of mostly incompetent coders and a giant army of business analysts, architects, project managers and other varieties of monkey trained in various levels of sales and management speak. Needless to say the consultancy left the internal team todo most of the coding work and spent alot of time making presentations, sending long e-mails, creating complex charts of various kinds and then left the delayed, feature barren, burning carcass of of the project behind and pocketed alot of cash.
The one thing that the consultancy brought with them that actually helped was a team of sub-contracted QA staff who were located off-site at the consultancy's office, some miles away. I was even younger and stupider then than I am now and at first I complained bitterly about the 2 page bug reports that I began to receive from them on a regular basis. These reports would contain a massive amount of detail for even the most trivial bug, complete (often 100%) repro cases for bugs which were incredibly complex and (IMO at the time) were never going to be found by normal users. The reports often also contained references to specific areas of the functional specs that we had written at the start of each project which our implementation was not entirely adhering to.
Now that I am less young, less stupid and work in the game industry I pine regularly (as my colleagues will no doubt confirm) for those QA people whose bug reports were so clear, complete, accurate and detailed. The bug reports I receive now from game team testers are like drawings on the wall of a cave when compared to the reports described above. They are short, unclear, often completely inaccurate and sometimes the text is not even recognizable as English.
The reason for this massive discrepancy in report quality is glaringly obvious. When I worked at the consultants office for a little while (just prior to leaving that job) I actually sat next to the QA team. The difference between that QA team and all the QA teams I've worked with in games was like night and day. In a word, they were professionals. Most of them were graduates with 5-10 years of work experience, they were obviously well paid (some of them better paid than me I think) and their personal appearance and hygiene put most of the coders to shame. They had analyzed our entire functional spec, without any interaction with the development team and created a complete test plan which they synced up to our development schedule. They had identified a number of complex testing tools which were appropriate for our product, acquired them and were actively using them to find bugs the we could hardly even imagine. They were often able to isolate the causes of problem, when the cause and effect were in totally unrelated parts of the product (functionally speaking).
That's not to say that the game QA teams I've worked with have been all bad, but they're a totally different class of tester than the guys at the consultancy. I suppose that the title of this post is alittle misleading, as I have also worked with the class of tester found in the games industry in other industries, but they are less common and generally in smaller numbers.
Anyway, before I get modded off topic the real point of this post is that I would like to see the kind of testing described above happen more in the industry