How are videogames tested?

I was curious to find out what is involved in videogame testing, assuming that it's actually a really complex series of sprite collison detection and vector graphic inspection(!)

This was partly inspired by James Whittaker's talk on the Future of Testing where he shows a HUD for testing based on videogame HUD's, the general rise of 'FutureTest' as an industry term and partly because we are about to begin testing a next gen application which will provide a rich user interface.

As highlighted in a recent Eurostar webinar Testing, The Next Level by Erik Boelen, there is very little shared information about testing and this appears true for videogame testing too.

From the Wikipedia Game Tester article there is a link to Videogame Tester Hub which has an interesting article of Game Tester Error Examples which indicates the kind of errors and areas for testing which are typical.

Google Search brings up a couple of good (old) articles on Working as a Tester and The View from Inside QA.

Are there any videogame testers lurking on this site that can shed more light on this dark art? Or is it very similar to all other testing?

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Ponnet on May 28, 2009 at 1:09pm: There was an interesting presentation from the EA QA Manager a year or two back at the SIGIST conference - I can't remember his name though.
He presented their approach to QA which was quite unusual, I thought. In short - don't shoot me if I don't get it right, it was a while back:
- They have a group of developers, architects, etc brainstorming what the new game is about and what it should support. Like, we should do this racing game, state of the art graphics, online playable all over the world with different languages (tester in the corner takes frantic notes). And with different cars, racing courses and you should see the glass flying away when you crash into something (tester takes more notes and breaks out into sweat, how does one test the angle of glass flying away is correct?), etc you get the idea
- Developers and testers are paired together and at design and coding the tester takes notes what the developer designs and jots down test cases. These sheets become the basis for later testing
- using the test sheets the application is then tested as early as possible
- a developer who breaks the build goes into bug prison and is not allowed new development for a couple of days - they can only fix bugs (seems to work wonders for the quality of the code)
- at some point the QA group says, OK, no more new features/requirements, fix what you have so they are effectively become responsible for the scope of the application. This is actually a gradual process with a bottleneck at the end where no new requirements are allowed to go in. The remaining fixes are put in, tested and the application shipped.

At the beginning he said that when he started he had to throw away the books and relearn everything that he knew about the software development lifecycle. At the end he revised that and said that if you look closer the same practices take place, just in a somewhat different format.

You might find more information at the SIGIST site, just an idea.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Mudit Narang on May 30, 2009 at 6:24am: Hi Martin, this is Mudit Narang, i worked for Sony Online Entertainment as an Game tester for one year, game testing is done by playing game on special server made only 4 QA people, sony has online game applications.; ▶ Reply to This