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QA人员是开发团队不可或缺的组成要素

发布时间:2012-04-16 13:51:36 Tags:,,

作者:Brandon Sheffield

也许你是位美工。也许你是位编码员。也许你是位设计师或制作人。也许你身兼上述所有工作。但你多半是专注于上述某个领域,你有明确的职业发展路线。你可以成为音效主管——或者你可以转变成技术美工。掌握若干操作技巧,变成专攻AI的设计师。

但你的QA(质量保证)团队没有具体的职业道路。质量保证是游戏开发的一大重要元素,在激励成员发展方面,我们经常鼓励QA人员跳脱QA领域。许多QA专业人士都会谈到“脱离其中”,转投制作或设计路线。难道你不希望优秀QA人员继续从事QA工作?难道他们不应享受其中,在此职业中谋求发展?这一观念难道没有任何不妥?

why QA sucks(from workingpoint)

why QA sucks(from workingpoint)

获得回馈

QA人员是抵御糟糕评论的前锋。Obsidian创意总监Chris Avellone最近表示,公司没有从《Fallout: New Vegas》中获得任何回馈,原因在于他们因1%之差未能实现85%的Metacritic评分目标。他们因此需要进行裁员。

游戏评论者有时就像测试人员。他们打破界限,找出没有人会进行操作的内容。他们以错误顺序完成关卡任务。总之,他们破坏你的游戏,称其漏洞百出。这会给你的Metacritic分数带来什么影响?

不是所有漏洞都能遭到制止,但凭借创造性测试和充足时间,你将创造出倍受欢迎的作品。大家都知道QA非常重要,但请务必认真对待这一工作。你是否鼓励自己的QA人员进行创造性思考,付出更多努力?你是否将他们视作团队的重要成员?

多数QA人员都是来自想要法设法进入游戏行业的新手人员。他们着迷于游戏,但不知道要如何投身其中,所以他们选择QA道路。也许他们听闻有些游戏设计师起初是从测试员做起。他们并不希望自己永远停留在QA领域。他们有何理由这么做?在游戏领域,这一职业工作时间长,收入水平低(游戏邦注:有经验的人员平均年收入不到4.8万美元,几乎比另一种低级别游戏工作者还要少3万美元左右)。许多QA都是外包人员,工资水平很低,待到项目完成后就打包走人。

这听起来会是会吸引你的职业?或者是会激发你进行创造性思维的职业?这是包含具体职业道路的职业?若你的最大动力就是尽量晋升至主管,然后跳槽到其他部门,那么你是否把QA工作当成一回事?

很多次我听到“开发团队”和“QA”说话的感觉仿佛他们并非同道中人。在很多公司中,“开发团队”和“QA”总是存在实体界限,即便这一障碍并非真正的建筑。QA是开发团队的组成部分。那么为何二者间存在这一心理空间间隔?

若你觉得QA人员不尽人意,那就不要聘用此类表现平平的人员。若你想要优秀人士加入QA团队,那么就需要改变自己思考整个开发团队的方式。若QA被视作是可行的职业道路,是游戏开发的重要组成元素, 那么它就不再低人一等,你的游戏就会变得更杰出,因为创意人士将思考如何提高游戏作品和制作过程。

例如,在Valve,所有人员都有自己的专攻领域,但大家都是开发人员。所有人都持续体验游戏,因此所有人都是QA。这听起来还不错,是吧?我们如何在自己的公司达到这等综合水平?

提高QA人员的地位

首先要做的就是改变公司在QA方面的文化和思维方式。邀请QA主管参加重要会议(游戏邦注:尤其是创意会议)。确保主管给予QA团队同等的尊重。确保QA团队时常同开发团队所有人员保持沟通。

在QA方面提高诱人的职业道路。团队通常包含若干同时负责多项内容的多面手及若干领导人员。此外,对音乐感兴趣的QA专业人士应该同时成为音效团队的一份子,积极创造能够进行测试的声音地图,而且允许他们做出适当调整。那些对技术感兴趣的人士应该定期同业内主管保持沟通,以查看画面帧率,告知需要减少加载量的地方。

最后,不要在完成项目后抛弃这些人员。你定希望获得忠实的员工,那么公司就应该采用长期聘用制。你应该聘用兼具多种技能的QA专业人员(游戏邦注:就像我们在其他学科领域采用的策略一样)。除非你的团队非常庞大,否则你多半不会聘请只擅长配置模型的美工。这无疑是项专长,你会重点利用他们的这一技能。但当步入建模阶段时,他们又能够在此发挥作用。所以你无疑应该尽量吸收这类人才。

若你真的需要调整QA人员,不妨聘用受控于内部固定QA团队的外部QA人员。若你将某团队成员看作一次性可消耗资源,那么他们多半也不会为你尽心尽力。(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

Opinion: Let’s talk about why QA sucks

by Brandon Sheffield

["Quality assurance is an incredibly important pillar of game development, and the industry as a whole does not treat it accordingly," argues Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield in this op-ed originally printed in the April 2012 issue.]

Maybe you’re an artist. Maybe you’re a coder. Maybe you’re a designer, or a producer. Maybe you’re all of these. But chances are, if you fit into one of those categories, you have a career path of some kind set before you. You can become an effects lead–you can move laterally and become a tech artist. Learn some behaviors and become an AI-oriented designer.

Your QA team doesn’t have a career path though. Quality assurance is one of the most important aspects of game development, and all we encourage our QA staff to do is move “up and out” of the QA slog, if we inspire them to move up at all. Many QA professionals talk about “getting out” and moving to the production or design path. Don’t you want good QA folks to keep doing QA? Shouldn’t they enjoy and want to start in their jobs? Isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

Get Bonus

Your QA staff is your front line of defense against bad reviews. Obsidian creative director Chris Avellone recently mentioned that the company didn’t get a bonus for Fallout: New Vegas because the game missed its Metacritic target of 85 percent by one percentage point. They had to reduce staff as a result.

Game reviewers play a lot like testers sometimes. They push against boundaries, and find those things you’re pretty sure nobody will ever bother to do. They complete quests in the wrong order. They jump over a wall and trigger a cutscene that wasn’t meant to happen for hours. In short, they break your game, then call it buggy. What does that do to your Metacritic score?

Not all bugs can be prevented, but with creative testing and enough time (that’s the kicker!) you can get most of the showstoppers. Everyone knows QA is important, but let’s really think about that. Is your QA team inspired to think creatively, and go that extra mile? Are they treated like important members of the team?

Most QA is hired from a pool of fresh-faced kids who just want to get into the industry any way they can. They are passionate about games, but aren’t sure how to break in, so they take the QA route. Maybe they’ve heard about game designers who started as testers. What they don’t want to do is stay in QA forever. And why would they? The hours are long, and the pay is the lowest in the game industry, at under $48,000 average across all years of experience, almost $30k under the next-lowest discipline. Many are hired on contract, at low wages, then get let go when a project is complete.

Does this sound like a job you’d want to stay in? Or a job where you’d be incentivized to think creatively? Is this job with a career path? If the biggest incentive you’re given is to become a lead and then move to another department, how much can you really care about working in QA?

How many times have I heard “the dev team” and “QA” spoken of as though they’re different things? In many companies there’s a physical wall between “the developers” and QA, if not an entire building. QA is part of the dev team. Why is there this mental space between the two?

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think the QA kids are scrubs, stop hiring scrubs. If you want people other than scrubs to apply, there needs to be a fundamentally different way of thinking about the entire department. If QA is thought of as a viable career path, and a truly important part of game development, it won’t be considered lower-tier, and your games will get better, because creative people will be thinking about how to improve your games and processes.

At Valve, for instance, everyone has specialties, but everyone is a developer. Everyone plays the game all the time, and thus everyone is QA. That’s not so bad, is it? How can we reach this level of integration in our own companies?

Quality time

The first thing to do is to change the company culture and mind space surrounding QA. Invite QA leads to important meetings. Creative meetings! Make sure you, or your leads, speak of QA with the same respect you’d have for any other discipline. Make sure your entire team is speaking to everyone else on the team, and regularly.

Next, offer an appealing career path within QA. Certainly there will be generalists that check everything, and some general leads. At the same time, QA professionals that are interested in music should essentially be part of the sound team, working to develop an audio map to test against, with the power to implement changes. Those with a tech bent should be speaking regularly with the leads in that area to monitor frame rates, and suggest areas for reducing load. And so on and so forth.

Finally, don’t lay them off when a project completes! If you want loyal employees, your company should be hiring for the long term. You should be recruiting QA professionals with a variety of skills that can be applied across the project, like you would in any other discipline. Unless your team is gigantic, you likely don’t hire an artist who is only good at rigging. It’s a specialty, sure, and you rely on them for that. But when it’s time to do a bit of modeling, or mocap cleanup, they can be counted on. So too should it be for your QA staff.

If you really need to ramp up and down our QA, use external QA groups managed by your permanent internal QA team. If you think of any members of your team as an expendable resource, they will not do their best work for you.

This is only the start of the discussion. QA is an incredibly important pillar of game development, and the industry as a whole does not treat it accordingly. If you want to see your next bonus, maybe it’s time to change all that.(Source:gamasutra


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