A Bug's Life.... Awesome article about being QA
polycounter lvl 18
http://www.edge-online.co.uk/archives/2006/06/a_bugs_life.php
I can definitely say I've seen both sides of the coin.
At EA, we worked in what were refered to as tester "pits" for one game, and had my own private cubicle with a sliding glass door and full size desk for the next. Ironically, my interaction and general happiness was inversely related to the quality of my workspace. On the 'pit' game, I spent a majority of my time over with the developers, because I was one of the few testers that actually had a clue as to what the hell made the game tick. I was usually the one going over to discuss the problems with the coders /artists and would end up spending most of the day over with them. On the other game, the only time I saw a developer was when someone else on the QA team had their coder friend come over to visit; and they were actually pretty rude to the rest of the QA team. The 'blame game' got tossed around a lot, but fortunately our QA leads wouldn't stand for it and more often than not the devs got mud in their faces because of it.
At my current QA job at Locomotive Games (small psp dev for THQ) there's four of us. THQ has a seperate testing group that also reviews the games, but they've proven to be pretty unreliable, and we're in direct contact with the dev team (across the cubicle from us). It's a small company, everyone's really friendly, the entire team LOVES us, and our input has been listened to and drastically changed the game(s) we've worked on. The producer is always stopping by our office to make sure all's cool, and welcomes us to stop by his office to discuss our concerns about the game, which we often do. I thoroughly enjoy working there, even as QA.
I can definitely say I've seen both sides of the coin.
At EA, we worked in what were refered to as tester "pits" for one game, and had my own private cubicle with a sliding glass door and full size desk for the next. Ironically, my interaction and general happiness was inversely related to the quality of my workspace. On the 'pit' game, I spent a majority of my time over with the developers, because I was one of the few testers that actually had a clue as to what the hell made the game tick. I was usually the one going over to discuss the problems with the coders /artists and would end up spending most of the day over with them. On the other game, the only time I saw a developer was when someone else on the QA team had their coder friend come over to visit; and they were actually pretty rude to the rest of the QA team. The 'blame game' got tossed around a lot, but fortunately our QA leads wouldn't stand for it and more often than not the devs got mud in their faces because of it.
At my current QA job at Locomotive Games (small psp dev for THQ) there's four of us. THQ has a seperate testing group that also reviews the games, but they've proven to be pretty unreliable, and we're in direct contact with the dev team (across the cubicle from us). It's a small company, everyone's really friendly, the entire team LOVES us, and our input has been listened to and drastically changed the game(s) we've worked on. The producer is always stopping by our office to make sure all's cool, and welcomes us to stop by his office to discuss our concerns about the game, which we often do. I thoroughly enjoy working there, even as QA.
Replies
Glad to hear that your job is going well though flaag!
The guys there were just hearded into offices and set side-by-side in what must have been one of the most crampt working environments I'd ever seen. It was more like a call center than a games testing company, although during the end of my cycle there the company bought the entire upper half of the building and enjoyed the space of the three floors. Perched on the edge of an industrial estate, it was difficult to find any enthusiasm about going there everyday.
The guys who got the company running (4 founders and several bought tallents from other sectors) are now millionaires thanks to the hard work, long hours and low wages of the QA teams. At Babel we covered the entire European sector so they could get away with paying hordes of foriegn students minimum wages without any form of stable contract or benefits. In fact if work was thin, half the company would be "fired" only to be re-hired a few weeks later when whatever contract with whatever developer / publisher came to fruition.
The testers didn't have any contact with developers but did have dev kits a plenty. One per desk in fact. We got Cube games on these cool flash roms, not mini dvds. There was insane security measures in the building but games did get out and equipment was stolen all the time.
Babel had a "hit squad" that they would fly all over the world, this is when they got to work with the developers on tight shedules and I guess this was the real perk of the job for my collegues.
(I made babels site before leaving: www.babelmedia.com )
"requesting QA staff bring their own mirrors after cleaners complained about the amount of cocaine they were having to wipe from the toilet seats."
Erm right yeah, 'cos people usually snort cocaine directly off of *actual* toilet seats.
"As measly as QA pay usually is, its usually hourly, and over 14-hour days it can easily outstrip that of salaried artists, designers and coders."
I find that statement *extremely* hard to believe. But I guess it depends where you work.
The article is a teeny bit 'oh woe is me' in terms of the life of the tester, and whilst I definitely sympathize, devs can have it tough too and some of the things that are complained about in the article can also apply to devs. I've had a really mixed experience with the quality of QA at EA. I think it's gotten significantly better over the last few years, but 4 or 5 years ago the quality of staff seemed to be pretty poor. I guess you get what you pay for, but there was nothing more infuriating to me than to come in on a monday morning, open up devtrack and have 14 new vaguely or woefully inadequately described bugs assigned to me. 'The graphics are wrong'. A lot of the stuff I used to get weren't even technically bugs, they were opinions. "Bond does not look like Pierce Brosnan. Please fix". Things seem to be much, much better in that respect now though.
One thing that the article could have made more of, even though the comments below it seem to disagree, is that it *can* be a stepping stone into other areas of development. Very very rarely Art or engineering, but certainly design and production roles. Almost all of the producers/managers and development director types at EA that I know, got there through QA/test. Ironically, they often get treated like and feel like grunts, but they have a possible route into senior management roles at the company that aren't really open to the artists and engineers (not that I'd want a management role anyway). So it can be an interesting situation of revenge of the QA worker. Maybe that's why most producers I know are dicks. It's their payback time ;-p That was an interesting read though thanks.
As for the pay, I can kind of believe getting paid better than a low level artist if it's a real heavy project.
Heh, I almost want to apologize for some of the bugs you had to put with, cause yah, about 75-90% of the testers I worked with didn't have a single effing clue about video games beyond "I play games often". Graphics, code, audio, interface... etc etc etc... not a effing clue. (Something I'm actually getting rather annoyed with at my current job is one of the other three guys is CONSTANTLY trying to act like he knows what he's talking about, ends up wasting the dev's time, and I usually have to cut in and restate what he took 15 minutes to 'explain' in maybe 2 minutes so the dev no longer has a "WTF" look on his face.) Honestly though, I think some of the testers at EA became somewhat vindictive from the kind of blowing-off we would get when we'd report issues we considered a problem. A lot of the QA guys were more than a little annoyed when we were told our opinions of how fun or believable the game was didn't matter. As I explained to the producer over at Locomotive, I see QA as a representative of your target audience, if we're seeing things (gameplay or graphics or whatever) that we're finding to be a negative aspect of the game, you should probably consider fixing it.
As for the stepping stone bit... in some companies I can see that being a possibility. At EA, I kind of doubt that any more. There is/was an article that was posted on the wall of one of the QA floor's lounge, from back in the 90's I believe, where some suit from EA is quoted as saying that they usually move up someone from QA every two months or so, whereas the actual truth was roughly once every six months to a year. Also, a rather disturbing trend I noticed was that along with shortening dev cycles, EA was also drastically cutting back on the number of QA guys they had per project, and since they never keep their QA for more than 6 months (to avoid having to pay any sort of health coverage or the like), this was going to mean that they are going to constantly have a fresh load of inexperienced testers, but now fewer of them trying to do more work.
Hawken... We actually worked with Babel on our european games. Interesting to know that you worked for them.
I think apart from the casual testers, most full time staff work their way up the ranks fairly swftly then move on. About 1/4 of the babel staff moved to another company at one point. All at once. Some left to Sega and others into mobile phone jobs. I think it was one giant stepping stone for serious minded workers and not at all how I see other QA jobs described.
Got a friend of mine a job there but he failed the bug list due to a faulty sony memory card. They never called him back for an re-interview
A lot of QA guys from there run a site called "Thumb Acres"
1. I worked in EA Canada QA for 2 years and I have worked as a level designer/artist for 5.5 years. Working in QA first certainly helped me land the job and I was able to use other artists in the company as references.
2. You have to work a lot of fucking over time in QA to even make the base artist salary, and artists are not paid over time so you just work for free if need be.
3. I believe we have to work 11 hours to get a meal voucher which has to be purchased from our cafeteria.
4. I've never witnessed anyone snorting cocaine at work?
5. The general quality of QA has dropped significantly and I was really unimpressed with the lack of bugs and the quality of bugs we got on nba street3 and ssx4. On occasion I sent producers bugs because QA was not finding them. And yes I got a tonne of the flood light on the basketball court is not turned on. That is not a bug, it's artistic design from the art director.
6. There are quite a few full time QA staff that receive benefits, the people that get 6 month contracts are students and they are hired with the expectation they will return to school when the game ships. I received the same benefits as everyone else when I worked in QA at the lowest level, the only thing I upgraded to as an artist was a yearly bonus.
7. Contrary to popular believe artists and engineers test their work before QA see it eliminating quite a few bugs before they can be found.
8. At least 50% of producers and managers come from QA.
9. Features in games are actually cut back sometimes because QA will not have enough time to thoroughly test them.
10. In the last 2 years EA has changed quite a bit in terms of work life balance. It's pretty wicked and I really enjoy our bi weekly pizza and beer party with the whole team, QA included!
#3.... I would have killed to have such an option.. I really can't explain just how piss poor the food was that they offered us after the longer work days. I even offered to take the time off for dinner (which it was later revealed they were already cutting off, contrary to what they'd originally told us) and pay with my own money for my own food. The response I got wasn't directly this, but strongly suggested that if I did that, I'd get canned for leaving work.
Regarding #6... they were constantly cutting back on the number of full time leads, and there was no mention of anyone (even the 6-month contract guys that had returned more than once) getting the option of going to full time any time soon.
#7 .. would never put them down as not doing so, but some of the things we witnessed were blatantly "noone bothered"... or worse yet, we'd bug something, get told to shove off, and then the next go around we'd get bitched at as to why it'd never been bugged.
#8... yup
#10... I was fortunate, both the games I QA'd for EA were actually Maxis games, so we got invited over for the friday TGIF's (beer and snacks with the devs)... but we couldn't mention it to any of the other testers on the floor or the privilage would be revoked. We had to tell them it was a weekly meeting or something like that.
Malcolm is mostly correct, the majority of the 'good' QA guys filter up through the cracks and get into producer and other roles, its a great way to get experience as well as a foot in the door.
The condition of the 'work environments' for testers usually varies place to place. When I was with Microsoft we had 3 man offices and were fairly well treated for being temps and bottom of the food chain. Where as when I worked at Enix, we were basically thrown into a shitty little room and were treated rather poorly, always being manipulated to work overtime.
Nintendo was a mix of the two, where they are very strict, the working conditions where so-so, being in a room with 50 other QA staff tends to be miserable.
Worst place I worked at was VMC here in Redmond, they litterally treated QA as cattle to be hearded and coralled. Ive never seen such a shamble of an operation in my life and actually felt sorry for the QA thugs. (I was a core team lead at the time) and I always tried to make things as best as possible for my guys.
I have to say that being first-party QA was amazing, I got full benefits, treated very well and proved to be very valuable on-site when the off-site publisher QA team failed horribly each and every day.
But I have to say, Its been a bumpy road, but it was definitely one worth traveling. Im in a much better position in my career because of it.
edit: I have been QA for roughly 5.5 years as of last November, just to put some perspective on my views.
So other than some little nuissances, this job rocks. I don't feel imprisoned like I did at EA, and when we had to work OT (which was very rare) we got absolutely top notch food (that we got to choose) and sat with the devs chatting about game design and other things.