The gaming industry has been emerging as market’s demand continues to increase. This scenario brought forward to the development of new games and enhancements of the existing best rated games. Game developers had to ensure quality so that the software delivered will result to optimum number of patronizing gamers. In order to establish control over quality, a program known as game testing is designed to validate game contents and features prior to the official release of the software. The actual overall experience of the gamer to play a game is certainly a factor to consider in game testing. However, being a gamer doesn’t mean being a game tester. It is a common misconception that an exceptionally good gamer is a good game tester. A gamer usually spends his leisure time on merely playing games without a definite approach as long as he is having fun. On the other hand, a game tester is a gamer who takes into consideration the quality of the game being persistent to look for software defects with the use of definite testing methodologies.
Game as a software application follows a method in its course of development. One of these methods is regression testing to ensure that features prior to a fix that is not part of an enhancement are still in place and operate as designed. After an incorrect behavior has been identified as a bug, the game tester documents and reports this to the developer for analysis. The developer will work on a fix and will turn it over to the game tester for verification. This process is repeatedly done throughout the cycle of software development every time a defect has been observed and/or an enhancement has to be applied. After all reported defects and enhancements have been verified, regression testing should take place as well. There are subtle changes to the code that has an impact to the other portions of the game. Failure to accomplish proper regression testing results to customers’ dissatisfaction and decrease in sales for which developers are subject to release a new patch. This scenario could have been avoided if regression testing was not overlooked.
In order to come up with games’ advertised minimum and recommended system requirements, compatibility testing is conducted. The game is verified with different hardware components as well as operating systems and performance is evaluated for each configuration. Since games are normally played for a long period of time, its stability can be verified through soak testing. Through this, memory leaks resulting to odd game behavior are detected. This is performed by leaving the game running for a long a period of time, e.g. hours, days in different operating modes such as idle and pause states. Since games are published in different languages and story driven in form, the collection of all text strings known as game’s script is verified through localization testing. This ensures that the translation matches the natural speech patterns into which the game will be published.
Game testing is not just playing the game, but analyzing the game in order to uncover the defects ad explore enhancements in the software as part of the process to ensure quality. It is Quality Control at Play.
Rommie L. Patricio
Research and Development Manager
CheQ Systems, Inc.
