Wednesday 17 March 2010

I am a QA tester...

And I am sick of your shit.

Honestly, this job gets none of the appreciation and all of the scorn. We bust our asses with out of date code, working 24/7 to ensure coverage for developers who are there for half that time.

I'm not calling development easy. Not even close. I can look at a page of code and have a vague idea as to what's going on, but I could never write the stuff.

But give us a little respect. We work hard and we put in the hours to ensure you have a good, solid product in a game.

I forever hear people, complaining about bugs in games. They always attack the QA first. Straight off the bat it's our fault. Even I used to do it, when I was young and naive.

Consider this. Every bug in a project cannot be found. There's no way. Every bug can cause knock on effects which will lead to other bugs. So, a product will never be bug free. It's just a fact.

We find a lot of bugs. We churn out a lot of them, hundreds a day can come out of teams.

Do all these get fixed? No. Of course they don't. I've worked on projects that have just had over a thousand issues written off and the game stuck in a box. They were issues we had found.

First thing I hear from people? "Are you sure you tested this?"

Yes. We did. We word hard. Where is the praise when a game has minimal bugs? Heaped on the developers. Which is fine, they make they game. But they don't play it. They won't see what we do, as testers and gamers. They see a wall of text.

I personally worked on a project for 7 weeks. In those 7 weeks, I racked up over 600 hours of game play. On one game. We found a lot of bugs. Not all of them got fixed.

Just give us the credit we're due every now and then, you fucks.

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