Slides from Erik Hittenhausen's talk at November 2013's London Games Conference. Today, many of the most popular global franchises continually evolve rather than relying on a day one ship. The advance of digital games and DLC has meant that it is now more important than ever that quality of a product and subsequent updates remain consistent

1. Testronic
Your Partner in Quality

2. The Challenges of Quality Assurance
for an Ever-Changing Product
Erik Hittenhausen
Head of Functionality & Compliance QA
– Games (Testronic)

3. The Challenges
• Traditional Retail
ONE chance to get it right
• New Business Models
Multiple opportunities to screw up
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4. Traditional Retail
A project with a defined scope, start
and end date.
Updates and patches post-release do
not have to be tied to strict deadlines
Quality upon release main benchmark
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5. New Business Models
Mobile and Free To Play
• An on-going project, with ever
increasing scope
• To stay successful and competitive
the product has to be updated at
regular intervals
• Consistency of quality main
benchmark
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6. Risks involved in New Business Models
Multiple releases means multiple risks
• Breaking live environment
• Bad patch leads to negative social media and press coverage
• Compliance: changing requirements of platform holders
• Compatibility: keeping up with the latest hardware
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7. How to deal with the challenges
• Build and retain a core QA team
• Establish and define a synchronous
Release and QA cycle
• Develop and maintain an evolving test plan
• Break down the product
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8. Build and retain a core QA Team
More stable resourcing of QA teams is key
• Retain your core team
• An experienced dedicated team helps to retain a working knowledge
of the product allowing efficiency gains to keep up with the growing
scope/content of the product
• Specialising people and embedding expertise (exploratory testers,
playthrough wizards, compatibility, compliance)
• Capatilise on experience and efficiency by effective test planning and
checklist creation
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9. Release and QA cycle
Establish and define a synchronous Release and QA cycle
• Example 2 week cycle:
 compliance passes
 compatibility passes
 one exhaustive pass of all features and content
 continuous scripted and exploratory testing of features and
content under going development
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10. Planning / Legacy Content vs. New Content
Break down the test focus and optimise the QA cycle by identifying
which content is affected by updates:
• Stable Content
 Content already tested and unaffected by ongoing
development can be re-tested once throughout the QA cycle
• Changing Content
 Existing content which is being changed, updated or
expanded, understand what is affected
• New Content
 Content that is being added and may interact with stable
and/or changing content and must be tested continuously
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