![]() QA Tester (Outsourced): Employee of our Outsourcing Partners (such as QLOC) who works with the internal team and assists in testing development, verifying fixes, and giving feedback.Ĭommunity/Beta Tester: Paradox Community Member who under NDA gets access to an in-progress build to give feedback and partial bug reports on - which the QA will later collate and verify. QA Tester (Embedded): Employee of Paradox Development Studio, who lead the charge in testing development, verifying fixes, and giving feedback. QA Lead: Represents the QA team’s interests on the project leadership level, manages day to day prioritization and coordination of testers. QA Manager: Professionally manages the QA Team, less involved in the day to day and more involved in the growth and development of the QA Team as individuals and overseeing staffing. The People - QA Team Breakdown: QA Director: Represents the QA team’s interests on the studio leadership level, ensuring that all plans of release and development are taking into consideration the bandwidth and requirements of their team. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about “what exactly a QA Lead does and how my role as Manager/Director was different” so I thought I would take some time to flesh this out for you all with at least a basic explanation. The People, The Process, The Timeline, and Going ForwardAs we’ve moved through the more public side of the development process, my role in QA has shifted while the meme of me as a QA Lead has remained the same. Throughout this diary I will go into more detail about what I mean. I digress and will stop there before I get into a longer wided sidenote. The trick is to find a system that creates as many safeguards as possible without fully boxing in the creativity of the team. Video games may be a product to be sold but they are also inherently an art, which makes QA’ing and solving their problems a much more subjective experience at best. The most lock-tight development model that does not allow for any “bugs” also does not allow for any creativity on the part of the developers. ![]() I wish this were true, but there is no silver bullet for development.Įach model of development and testing mitigates risk in a separate way, but there is still inherently some risk especially because we are talking about the potential for human error: missing connections or building on top of a system that was not originally written with such a perspective multiple iterations ago. The Job of QA is to test and test appropriately balancing the time for technical feedback and gameplay balance based on the development timeline of the game.Īnd before we get too far, the comment that I expect to get the most to this diary:“Why don’t you use, it will solve all your problems! ” ![]() Well because in that scenario the bottleneck of quality would not be the QA but the developers on the other side of the bug fixes - it's their bandwidth that would then be the limiting factor. Paradox games are unique in their complexity of interlocking mechanics and systems that to test the full functionality of the game and all of its iterations for every change is impossible.Īn infinite number of QA with an infinite budget and time could still not deliver a near perfect quality product. Not everything can get tested, it's a sad fact. Broken builds, delays, reworks, and merge errors - these are an everyday occurrence in our profession.Įven when things go perfectly, QA is still a race against time or more specifically a race of timeboxing: what is the most important thing to test now and what can be put aside to when there is either time or it is more complete - do we suspect another Market Rework is coming or are we at the final implementation at last?Ī regular QA posting, usually among ourselves. Though this is honestly a great introduction to what it's like to QA Victoria 3, or how it is to be a QA in general.Īs we are at the end of the pipeline we must be the most adaptable members of the team. We will eventually have an Audio Dev Diary (looks hopefully at Community) but for now you’ve all locked in here with me again about a subject I know all too well: how it is to QA Victoria 3. IntroductionI lied! We’re not talking about Audio this week, we’re talking about Quality Assurance, otherwise just known as QA!Įxcuse the dust as we teardown and set up this new development diary a little earlier than planned. ![]()
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