How "game-as-a-service" projects should pay attention to QA
Yevhenii Skachkov
What the talk is about
Yevhenii Skachkov explains why the classic approach, where QA joins at the end of development, fails for "game as a service" projects. He draws on the online shooter Warface, which has hundreds of thousands of daily players and ships an update every month. Main ideas: each bad update loses part of the audience and crunch is not an option, so QA is embedded in teams from the design stage. Defense has three levels: testers inside the dev team, an integration team, and a public test server. Test cases and documentation are updated together with each feature, backed by checklists, regression testing and as much automation as possible. The key metric is the number of blockers reaching live; it is improved by analyzing missed bugs, developing QA people and shipping smaller releases. Useful for QA leads, managers and producers of live games.