作者：Tulay Tetiker McNally

因为不理解质量是整个团队所担负的责任，而QA只是贡献于其中的一大组成部分，所以团队才会责怪QA不能找出相关漏洞。

QA的一大角色便是通过影响整个团队而将质量带向一个更高的层面，并确保团队使用的是正确的工具和过程去发展质量。

为了履行职责，工作室的领导者和开发文化必须赋予他们相关权利，而开发者和制作人也必须给予他们深深的肯定与支持。

QA(from oschina)

在游戏开发早期，调试是开发者的职责。大约在15至20年前，游戏工作室开始盛行让1或2名测试人员基于终端用户的角度去测试游戏。

随着游戏主机的出现，游戏开发变得更加复杂。发行商也意识到他们有必要投资于更大规模的测试人员，也就逐渐形成我们所熟知的质量保证。

如今，许多发行商们都拥有大量的测试者，但同时也仍有许多开发者保持着较小的团队，即拥有更高技能的测试者（不管是从技术还是游戏悟性来看）。

人们总是认为测试就是“一整天都在玩游戏并且还能从中获得报酬。”这经常被当成一种“轻松且有钱赚”的工作。不幸的是正因为如此让QA在游戏产业的某些领域积攒了一些负面的名声。

幸运的是，我们一直在努力改变人们对QA的看法，而因为现在的产业趋势是专注于更少且更高质量的游戏，所以也将有效地改善这种情况。

改变雇佣标准也有可能影响人们对QA看法的改变。我相信人们所带有的“一整天都在玩游戏并且还能从中获得报酬”的看法将消失。

最近我阅读了一则对于Zappo首席执行官的访问，即关于糟糕的雇佣决定让其公司损失了将近1亿美元。这与你雇佣一名新人去执行图像设计，程序或QA等任务是一样的。

就像在BioWare，我们的雇佣标准非常高。我们的开发原则便吸引了许多人才的加入。而在QA领域我们也设置了相同的目标。如果你想要实现AAA级游戏的QA，你便需要雇佣具有正确心态和技能组合的合适之人。

因为每一个应聘者都需要经历严格的预选与访问过程，所以我们能够从中找到最优秀的QA人才。

我认为游戏产业在许多情况下总是低估或者未能有效利用QA。而这不仅会伤害那些认真看待测试的专业QA人员，同时也会让他们觉得自己对于游戏的任何看法都不会得到认可。

我同样也相信有很多人会认为游戏公司可以随便从街上抓几个测试者，然后付些小费而控制他们“一整天去玩游戏”，并且当结果不如自己预期的有价值时倍感惊讶。

QA并不像人们想象中那么轻松，他们总是非常有趣，具有创造性和分析性，所以理应获得奖励。

在一个完善的组织中，测试总是从一开始便包含于开发过程中—-即从确定愿景和理念到预先制作，完成制作，收尾以及预先发行支持。

在游戏开发循环的每一个点上都需要执行质量管理

在BioWare，QA总是在一开始便发挥了作用，即咨询项目团队有关功能的可测试，明确一些难以测试的内容，并预先制定测试方法，从而找出潜在风险并从用户的角度去提供重要反馈。

BioWare中的质量保证能够在开发循环的所有过程中与开发者进行有效协调，即扮演着游戏开发中不可分割的重要角色。同时我也需要提醒你们，QA团队并不是受控于开发团队或接受开发团队所分配的任务。相反地，QA团队是听从于上级QA管理者。

在过去13年间我们已经创造了一个能够有效支持开发的系统。我们通过证明了自己的价值而获得了来自开发团队的信任与尊重。但却不是一开始就有了这种好结果，

也许是直到《Baldur’s Gate II》，大多数QA工作才有了回应。如果QA团队能够清楚游戏的开发过程，他们便会知道如何更好地测试游戏。

所以他们便请求设计师的帮助，学习工具箱的使用，并利用与开发者间的友好关系而进一步了解游戏开发与整个开发过程。可以说《无冬之夜》是BioWare的第一个大转折点。

这时候QA团队已经开始使用NWN工具去测试动画，图像，资产等内容（游戏邦注：过去，他们是在一个受控环境中进行测试），并且开始得到开发团队的信任，人们对于他们的看法也开始发生改变。

而在开发《Knights of the Old Republic》的时候，QA主管已经开始参加设计师和程序员会议，从而更积极地获得所需信息，并将其与其余的团队成员进行分享。而那时候QA团队被分成两块学科，即技术（支持程序员）和设计（那时候主要是支持设计师和作家）。

之所以会出现这种分化主要是基于任务所求，QA成员想要划分开发者所支持的工作，并且他们也有自己的喜好/能力所向。

而在《Jade Empire》的开发过程中，QA部门首次成为了开发的一部分，并且QA在一开始就参加了计划会议。

现在我知道并不是每间工作室都拥有如此长的QA合作历史。而在BioWare我们已经使用QA长达10多年了。建立起对QA的信任，并维系起他们与开发者和制作人质之间的关系能够有效地影响我们公司的核心价值与工作室文化。

在BioWare，我们很幸运核心价值和工作室文化能够推动团队协作的培养，并确保每个部门与学科的平等。QA也拥有自己的发言权，并且他们的确是开发过程中不可分割的重要组成部分。

（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Part 1: The End of the Dark Ages for QA in game development

by Tulay Tetiker McNally

Teams that blame QA for not finding certain bugs, live in the dark ages of development, because they don’t understand that quality (or the lack of it) is the responsibility of the entire team and that QA is only one of the groups contributing to this effort.

One of the roles of QA is to lead the road to quality by influencing the whole team to put quality at a higher level and by making sure the right tools and processes are in place to enforce quality throughout those processes.

To be in a position to do so, you need to be empowered by your studio’s leadership and development culture and have the trust and backing from developers and producers.

In the very early days of game development, typically debugging was a developer’s responsibility. About 15/20 years ago it started to become common practice to bring on one or two testers who would test games from the end-user’s perspective.

With the introduction of gaming consoles, game development began to become more complex. Publishers realized that they needed to invest in a larger pool of testers which then became known as Quality Assurance.

Today, a lot of publishers have large pools of testers whereas many developers still keep a smaller team of highly skilled development testers around that are both technical and game savvy.

Testing was romanticized as “playing games all day and getting paid for it”. It is often seen as a “foot in the door” job. Unfortunately this has at times given QA a bit of a negative reputation within some areas of the games industry.

Fortunately we’re working towards changing the perception of QA and the current industry trend of focusing on fewer but higher quality games helps with that.

Changing Hiring Standards might also influence this change of perception. I think, or I hope, that those days of advertisements about “playing games all day and getting paid for it” will be history soon.

I just recently read an Interview with Zappo’s CEO about how bad hiring decisions cost his company nearly $100 Million. It makes no difference how large or small an organization is or if you are hiring an entry-level employee or an executive, in Art, Programming or QA etc.

Our hiring standards at BioWare are high. Our development disciplines attract top talent to work on genre-defining AAA-titles. In QA we set ourselves the same goal. If you want AAA-QA, you need to hire the right people with the right mind-set and the right skill-set throughout the ranks.

Even for our temporary/entry level positions every candidate has to go through a rigorous pre-selection and interview process that have helped us to identify good QA talent.

I believe that the games industry is undervaluing or even underusing QA in many scenarios. This often leads to frustration among QA professionals who are taking testing seriously, but also feel powerless that their insights into the game are not heard;

QA traditionally has a high turnover in staff, because it is usually not seen as a career destination within games development. This inevitably leads to loss of knowledge and skill set. High turn-over of staff doesn’t help QA as a department or discipline to mature.

I also believe that there are still enough folks out there who are under the impression that you can just hire testers off the street, put a controller in their hand and pay them peanuts for “playing games all day” and are then surprised when the output is not as valuable as they expected.

You also often end up with people working on your product who have no personal investment in its success. QA is not easy; but it is rewarding, fun, creative and analytical!

In a good organization, testing is involved in the development process from the outset – from vision & concept over to pre-production, full-production, finaling and post-release support.

Quality Management is done at every point in the game development cycle
At BioWare we involve QA early on to consult with the project teams on the testability of features, identify things that might be hard (or impossible) to test, help develop test approaches in advance of anything being built, raising potential risks and providing feedback from a consumer perspective.

Quality Assurance at BioWare means working embedded with developers during all phases of the development cycle as an integral part of game development;
Mind you, being part of the scrum team doesn’t mean our QA team is being managed or tasked by the scrum team. This happens at the QA lead level.

Over the last 13 years we have developed a system that supports development in a very efficient way. We gained the trust and respect of the development teams by proving our value. But it was not always like that…

Probably up until Baldur’s Gate II, most QA work was reactionary. The core QA team, thought it would help them to better understand how to test the game if they understood how it was made.

So they asked designers to teach them and they learned how the toolsets worked and used their friendly relationships with developers to learn more about development and to have more visibility into the development process. Neverwinter Nights was probably the first big turning point for BioWare.

The QA team at this point had started to make test levels using the NWN toolset to test content such as animations, art, assets, etc. – they were testing in a controlled environment and the QA team started to earn the development team’s trust and the perception of QA in the studio started to change.

During Knights of the Old Republic, the QA Lead at that time (who incidentally is still with BioWare), had started to attend the designer and programmer meetings to get information pro-actively and share it with the test-team and it was during KotoR that the QA team was split into two disciplines – Tech (which generally supports programmers) and Design (which at that time was supporting mostly designers and writers).

The reason for the split was primarily for tasking purposes: the QA staff wanted to split up the developer support work amongst each other and went by their preference/talent for one or the other.

Jade Empire had established the QA department as part of development and for the first time, QA was invited to planning meetings from the start…. and the rest, as they say, is history

Now I understand that not every studio has such a long tradition of working closely together with QA. Remember we’ve been doing this for over a decade. Establishing trust and building relationships with development and production and delivering results had an impact as well on something so basic as our company’s core values and our studio culture.

At BioWare, we are fortunate that our Core Values and our Studio Culture enable and foster team collaboration where every discipline is seen as equal. QA has a voice, QA is embedded, QA is a truly integral part of development.(source:gamasutra)