MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

Also QA jobs are often about checking boxes and meeting quotas

Legitimate and important issues slip right through because a text box being misaligned is easier to spot.

Mindbendingly obscure & trivial issues get filed, while legitimate crashing issues or cases of logic going completely astray get missed.

This also ends up leading to dev time being spent fixing minor issues, sometimes introducing more serious ones (eg. cutting the framerate in half) then which go unreported, as they're not part of the testing criteria.

It ends up being a very mechanical process, something that doesn't tell you much useful beyond the automated tests anyway, as the QA teams often get treated like robots.

There have been a number of high profile examples lately of games with serious flaws being released, sometimes not even flaws that get corrected with an unfortunate day 0 patch.

Big studios/publishers getting a free pass *cough*Bethesda*cough*EA*cough* has always been an issue, but now the bar seems to be set ridiculously low even for smaller titles, rather than the bar being set higher for the big studios and 1st party games.

That's not to say QA is always bad, I've also worked with some great QA teams, even made friends with a few people on them who I thought were doing an exceptional job. However, a lot of those people now don't even work in QA, they were let go, because despite providing the best bug reports, they weren't meeting targets. Despite me finding their feedback valuable, some of the other studios they were working for didn't like the extra work they were having to do as a result of these bugs being uncovered so left poor feedback / didn't use that QA team again.

Good QA is massively undervalued, and misunderstood, but I can't see that changing as most studios just want to hear "everything is good, ship it!" while having to pay the minimum for QA.

These days, most QA gets done by the players foolish enough to play a game within the first 12 months of release; half the time for online games that means by the time the game doesn't have horrible issues, there's no active userbase left.