作者：Amma Jenelius

QA极为重要。这并不是我的一家之言，而是摘自今年GDC会议的结论，这一点也甚少遭致他人的反对。那么为何QA被人们认为是整个行业其他领域的跳板呢？为何QA测试人员普遍低薪？为何他们总会在自己付出诸多心血的游戏发布后就频频被解聘？为何这么多人不解我的公司会向今年的GDC派出两名QA代表？

在切入正题之前，我想提醒你本文只是我的一些个人见解，我也是通过吸收行业中的言论而形成这一观点。但我还是想在此与各位分享我们Paradox Interactive工作室的QA团队的一些心得。

现在让我们先从你该如何制作一款成功的QA游戏开始吧！对我个人来说，你需要搞定三个核心内容：

1.游戏应该具有吸引力和娱乐性。如果它很无趣，那么再好看也不会有人捧场。

2.玩家应该能够以一种高效而直观的方式同游戏互动。如果他们无从知道如何在你的砍杀游戏中舞刀弄剑，那就是你的问题了。

3.游戏应该尽量避免出现漏洞。有些游戏虽然含有漏洞仍可运行，但有些游戏却会因为漏洞而丧命。

在以上三项中，QA与第三个要点最为密切相关。在Paradox Interactive中，QA也要负责第二甚至是第一个要点。你明白我的意思了吗？如果你想制作一款好游戏，你需要优秀的QA测试。

game testing(from giantbomb)

因为QA非常关系，它应该由合适的人选来执行。不幸的是，并非所有测试人员都能胜任这一工作。QA并不意味着成天玩游戏，它意味着测试游戏。这两者之间的区别很大。如果你一开始就没有意识到，你得整天分解游戏，逐个查看游戏的各个环节，那么你的日子就会很难熬。你的工作并非坐在沙发上拿着控制器，喝着可乐玩游戏。QA绝不仅仅是成天无所事事偶尔才提交一两份报告。虽然有些公司仍然将寻找漏洞作为他们QA部门的主要职责，但许多公司还是采用了类似我们在Paradox Interactive所采取的做法。我们查看实用性、执行用户体验测试，并要求QA点评游戏的“趣味因素”。

除此之外，还要抛弃关于QA只是进入行业其他领域的跳板这种观念。我欣赏拥有QA背景的制作人，当然人人都有权利追求自己感兴趣的职业。但如果你清楚自己想做游戏设计师，那么请申请游戏设计师职业而非QA工作。如果你一开始就清楚自己并不打算在这个位置干上几年，那就不要自寻麻烦了。

我认为摆脱这个问题的一个方法就是，提升QA测试人员的岗位资质要求。行业中没有其他学科会随便从大街上找个人来顶班，那么为什么QA就应该这样? 我认为QA应该是一门正式的游戏学科——这一行的人应该具备软件测试的背景，当然具有行业其他学科的经验也可以。拥有动画背景的测试人员将能够更有效率地找到动画漏洞，而modder型人才则更容易破解你的编辑器。

让我们正视这一现实吧，我们很可能是在处理涉及大量资金的问题。你的QA团队经验越少，他们错过关键问题的风险就越大，从而可能导致你损失大笔资金。让我们先来举个具体的例子：在我们正在开发的一款游戏中，我们发现beta版本中的一个服务器问题。该游戏并非AAA级产品那么庞大的作品，但这个问题就足以让我们耗损13万美元。对于大型游戏来说，这可能不是什么大问题，但对于这个项目本身来说却真是一个不容小觑的问题。想象一下，如果我们没有在发布之前发现这个问题，我甚至没法去计算其中可能损失的收益，因为它已经惹恼了玩家。富有经验的测试人员更有可能预期到可能出现的问题，甚至可能事先就避免这些情况（如果他们介入早期开发过程的话）。不要误以为测试游戏很简单，而要保持学习的状态——你学得越多，状态自然就越好。

但我也并不是在指责那些向往其他工作岗位的QA测试人员。因为目前来看，QA的确并非任何想成就一番事业之人的首选。你成为测试人员，之后有可能成为经理或离开QA岗位——我们就可能因此而失去大量可用人才。并非人人都可以攀升到管理层。你可能是QA领域中的佼佼者，但却未必能胜任其他岗位，那么测试就是适合你的工作。毕竟让你成为管理者并不符合你本人和公司的利益。这正是为何你需要为这些QA人员规划职业生涯的原因。

在Paradox Interactive，我们才刚开始执行与之相关的系统。你可以先成为QA测试人员，做所有测试人员该做的事情——测试游戏。之后，如果你对此生厌并想追求新挑战时，你可以专攻一个特定的领域，并成为QA专家。我们团队在这方面的例子就是AI测试，用户调查和音频测试。之后，你可以最终成为一名高级QA专家——但我们目前还没有出现一名这样的人才。

虽然这一体系仍在萌芽期，但已经呈现显著成效。团队看似非常乐意专注于自己感兴趣的某一领域，我们所推出的游戏整体质量也在逐步提升。除此之外，我们还可以向求职者以及公司其余成员展现我们对待事情的认真态度，以一种具体的方式体现测试人员的实际竞争力。希望这一做法会让我们的测试人员更乐于长期留在公司中。

提到让测试人员留在公司中——如果我们每款游戏都采用新测试人员，那么就无法实现他们与团队所开发游戏的共同成长。测试人员随着时间的发展而积累的经验是无价的，如果重新开始就需要花费大量时间和精力。所幸，我们同时有多款游戏处于开发阶段，所以不存在淡季时保留QA团队所产生的问题。我们总有事情要做。只有偶尔才会有较少的项目，为了不让他们无所事事，我们会鼓励测试人员自我深造——参加讲座，观看视频，阅读文章和书籍等等。我们甚至会在没有太多其他事情可做的时候，每周分配一次这样的任务给他们做。这样，当工作任务变得繁重的时候，他们也更能够适应状态。

当然，我也理解并非所有工作室都是如此运行，并且在项目空窗期保留QA团队会产生大量的停工期——但在理想环境下，所有QA测试人员都应该是全职人员。应该向对待其他人一样平等对待QA，也应该欣赏他们对公司游戏的经验和理解。但是，我们的世界还远远不够完美。许多测试人员仍然只能做外包工作——甚至有人连续多年只接为期半年的合同，从未真正获得聘用。在我看来，这不应该是我们对待员工的方式。

我的意思并非将Paradox Interactive、我们的QA团队或我们的测试方式提升到一定的高度。我们在许多方面也仍然存在改进的空间，你可能会发现我们的游戏——正如其他许多游戏一样并不完美。但最终问题在于你如何利用资源。我们决定专注于保留较少的测试人员，给予他们成长为相关领域的专家这种机会——而不是保留一个只有资历较浅的QA测试员的庞大团队。目前这一理念颇具可行性，但我们仍然还需要努力。最重要的是，我们确实一直在向前推进。对我们来说，QA真的很重要。

所以，让我再问你一遍：如果QA真的像我们所认同的那样重要，为什么许多公司会那样对待QA团队呢？此外，我们该如何吸引合适的测试人员，如何把他们留下？如果我们所有要与QA共事的人，以及不需要接触QA的人，都能够开始思考该如何同QA测试人员互动以及QA整个学科的问题，相信从长期来看我们必将获得共赢。

我们都想推出热作，但没有QA这一切就无从谈起了。请不要再假装无所谓，开始尊重QA吧。（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）

The Respect QA Deserves, or Finding the Right People and Making Them Stay

by Anna Jenelius

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.

The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

QA is extremely important. Those are not my words. That’s a quote from a session at GDC this year, and it’s something I have not heard anyone disagree with. Ever. So then why is Quality Assurance considered just a stepping stone into the rest of the industry? Why are QA testers generally ridiculously underpaid? Why do they keep getting fired after the title they worked so hard on is launched? Why were so many people genuinely surprised that my company sent two QA representatives to GDC this year?

Before I start, I would like to remind you that what you are about to read are my personal thoughts and opinions, which I have formed by listening to and reading articles by people in the industry. I will, however, also share some of the philosophy we apply in my QA team at Paradox Interactive.

So here we go. Let’s start by looking at what you need to make a successful game! To me personally, there are three core things you need to get right:

The game needs to be engaging and entertaining. If it’s boring, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is. It just won’t sell.

The players should be able to interact with the game in an efficient and intuitive way. If they don’t know how to swing their sword in your hack-n-slash game, you have a problem.

The game should be as bug-free as possible. While some games make it despite bugs, some are brutally murdered by it.

In the list above, QA is most definitely involved with at least the third point. At Paradox Interactive, QA does the second and even the first one as well. Do you see what I’m getting at here? If you want to make a good game, you need good QA testing.

Since QA is quite essential, it needs to be inhabited by the right people. Unfortunately, to begin with, not all people working as testers are the right people for the job. QA does not mean playing games all day, it means testing them. That’s a huge difference. If you don’t realize right from the beginning that you will have to spend your days breaking down the game brick by brick while examining every side of those bricks, you’re going to have a hard time. You will most likely not sit on a sofa with a controller in your hands, balancing a Coke on your belly. QA has come a long way from just goofing around and occasionally file a report or two. While some companies still have bug hunting as their QA department’s main responsibility, many have moved in the same direction as we have at Paradox Interactive. We look at usability, perform user experience tests and have mandate to comment on the “fun factor” of the game, for example.

Furthermore – this fallacy that QA is just a stepping stone into the rest of the industry has to go. I appreciate that a background in QA is great for a producer, and of course everyone is free to pursue the careers they want in whatever field they are interested in. But if you know that you want to work as a game designer, please apply for game designer positions and not QA. If you know right from the beginning that you do not intend to stay for at least a few years, please don’t even bother.

One way to get rid of part of this problem, I would like to argue, is to raise the qualifications required for anyone to get a job as a QA tester. No other disciplines in the industry pick people off the street, so why should QA? The bare minimum, if you ask me, should always be a formal game education – a background in software testing should not be too much to ask either. Experience in other parts of the industry should be encouraged as well. A tester that has a background in animation will be more capable of finding animation bugs, and a modder might be able to break your editor in a more effective way.

Because let’s face it – if nothing else, we’re potentially dealing with a lot of money here. The less experienced your QA team is, the bigger the risk that they miss those really critical issues that end up costing you a lot of money. Just to give you a concrete example of what money we are talking about here: In one of the titles we have been working on, we discovered a server issue in beta. The title was not that big compared to your average AAA game, but that single issue still ended up costing us roughly 130.000 USD. That might not sound like much to some of you who work on bigger titles, but for this project it really was. Imagine if it had not been discovered before the launch of the game. I won’t even try to calculate the possible lost revenue we could have faced due to pissed-off gamers. An experienced tester will be more likely to anticipate issues and even preventing them from ever happening, if they are involved early enough in the development. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that testing games is easy. You keep learning things all the time – and the more you learn the better you get, obviously.

I do not, however, blame QA testers who glance longingly at the greener grass on the other side of the office. Because so far, QA has hardly been a good choice for people who want to make any kind of career. You become a tester, and then you can basically either become a manager or leave QA – and we risk losing a lot of capable people due to this. Management simply isn’t for everyone. You could be the greatest tester in the world but a terrible people-person, and then testing is what you should do. It’s not in your nor the company’s interest to make you a manager in that case. That’s why you need a career path for these people as well.

At Paradox Interactive, we have just started implementing a system for this. You start off as a QA Tester, doing what all testers do – test the games. Then, when you’re bored and up for a new challenge, you can specialize on a specific area and become a QA Specialist. Examples of areas in our team are AI testing, user research and audio. After that, you can eventually become a Senior QA Specialist – which we however have none of so far.

While still in the cradle, this initiative has proven to work very well. The team seems very happy to have been given the opportunity to focus on an area they are interested in and the overall quality of the games we put out is slowly improving. In addition to this, we can show job applicants as well as the rest of the company how serious we are about what we do, and in a very concrete way how much competence our testers actually possess. Hopefully, this will also make our testers more interested in staying with us for a long time.

Talking about making testers stay with the company – working with titles such as the ones our development studio creates (grand strategy franchises such as Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings), just wouldn’t be possible if we had fresh testers for each title. They are very complex and take so much time to get into that the experience the testers gain over time is priceless. Fortunately, since we have the advantage of having several titles in production at a time, it’s never a question of having to keep a team on hold during off-season. We always have something to do. In the rare case that we have less projects, the specializations themselves are a great fall-back. Instead of being idle, the testers are encouraged to educate themselves – attend lectures, watch videos, read articles and books, and so on. We even allocate one day a week especially for those kinds of tasks, if we don’t have too many other things to do. That way, they will be even more able and efficient when the work-load is getting heavier again.

Of course, I do understand that not all studios work that way and keeping the QA team on board between titles could create a lot of expensive down-time – but in a perfect world, all QA testers should have full-time employments. They should be treated with the same respect as everyone else, and their experience with the company’s titles should be appreciated. However, our world is unfortunately far from perfect. Many testers are still unable to land anything but contract jobs – some might even sit on six-month contracts for several years in a row, without ever getting employed for real. In my opinion, that’s just not the way you treat people you care about.

Before I end this rant, I would just like to say that I don’t want to sound like I’m putting Paradox Interactive, our QA team or our way of testing on some kind of pedestal. We have a lot of areas that we are still working on improving, and you’ll probably find that our games – just as any other games – are not perfect. Ultimately, it’s about resources and how you use them. We have decided to focus on having fewer testers that, if they weren’t to begin with, are given the opportunity to grow to become experts in their field – rather than having a huge team with less qualified testers. It’s a concept that has worked quite well so far, but we still have a long way to go. The most important thing, though, is that we are really trying to move forward all the time. To us, QA is truly important.

So, let me just finish by asking you again: If QA is as important as most of us agree that it is, how come it’s treated the way it is at many companies? Also, how do we attract the right testers, and how do we make them stay? If we all, people who work with QA as well as people who do not, could just start thinking about how we talk about and interact with QA testers as well as the discipline as a whole, I’m sure we’ll all win in the long run.

We all want to make a hit, and without QA you’ll be sure to get an S before that word. Please stop pretending like that’s not the case and start showing QA some respect. （source：gamasutra）