Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Kyl Von Kull]

Roguey spoken like someone who doesn’t play games on release and instead waits a year so that the audience can catch all the bugs the underfunded QA department missed.

 

[Desert Fish]

They should be hiring more QA people, not pay them the same.

Or maybe just let more suckers fans beta test. I guess the downside is that the bug reports tend to be near useless.

 

[Duraframe300]

Roguey spoken like someone who doesn’t play games on release and instead waits a year so that the audience can catch all the bugs the underfunded QA department missed.

Rogueys not wrong though, the skill and importance involved is nowhere near comparable to actual devs (programmers, artists,...).
Paying all employees the same wage regardless of qualification and benefit is also unsubstaniable economical madness.
Now, you can argue QA Leads, but in that case they should do so worth their money (improving workflow, communication....) not just *guy the dev speaks to*.

That said ofc from what I've read about the games industry there are much bigger problems at hand and the relationship between dev team and qa is terribly organized and inefficent (from a outsiders perspective). But you're not going to solve that by throwing money down a hole. There need to be much bigger structual changes.

 

[Butter]

I honestly think for any studio with a decent-size audience, they could just do a closed beta and save money not hiring QA. There would be no noticeable difference in the quality of feedback.

 

[Nano]

No, they shouldn't. Using your audience to bugtest instead of having a proper QA division results in a worse product.

 

[The Bishop]

Doing QA somehow does not require much skill or training. Doing QA well however does require both and some talent of top of that. Good QA won't just spam your Jira with nondescript reports, but will make effort to reproduce and identify problem in a way that directs the dev immediately to the solution. This is both very valuable and pretty hard to get. But the nature of QA is that almost nobody sees it as a permanent career and so people don't stick around for very long, which leads to hiring practices being very lax on requirements, or else there wouldn't be anybody to do the job.

Don't ever expect users to send useful bug reports. Saving on QA only really just shifts the load of identifying and reproducing problems on the devs themselves, which in many cases means that problems will not be identified and reproduced and therefore never going to be fixed.

 

[Butter]

No, they shouldn't. Using your audience to bugtest instead of having a proper QA division results in a worse product.

I've done both. There's almost no difference.

 

[Wunderbar]

Usually QA finds all of the major bugs, the problem is that devs don't have time to fix them.

 

[Roguey]

Soo second-hand experience of QA means the dude thats worked in the game industry for like 50 years doesn't know anything? What?

Chris is an idealist. Sure, he was Feargus's little funding partner for a good number of years, but if his ideas about how to run a business ever met reality I'm sure his tune would change (or he'd go out of business either way).

To further my point, here's Pillars of Eternity's QA teams

QA Testers Markus Burks, Nick Carver, Blake Cramer, Steven King, Derek McInvale, Connor Richards, Charles Teng, Ken Tran

Paradox Interactive - QA Team
Senior QA Manager Artur Foxander
QA Manager Niklas Lundström
QA Specialist Niklas Ivarsson
QA Testers Emil Andersson, Pontus Anehäll, Erik Elgerot, Kajsa Falck, Malin Furöstam, Victor Järnberg, Anna Ström

QLOC S.A.
General Manager Adam Piesiak
Business Development Director Paweł Grzywaczewski
Director of Account Management Paweł Ziajka
Account Managers Marta Olejniczak, Jakub Trudzik
Head of Quality Assurance Sergiusz Ślosarczyk
QA Project Managers Marcin Górniak, Maciej Mazurek
QA Lab Managers Bartosz Antecki, Pawel Strzelczyk
QA Team Leaders Konrad Kołacki, Paweł Krawczuk, Michał Mugerman
QA Testers Ewa Angielska, Małgorzata Barkowska, Piotr Brodowski, Rafał Dąbrowski, Maciej Florysiak, Paweł Jaskólski, Sebastian Kocyłak, Joanna Kucharzyk, Rafał Lipski, Łukasz Mazur, Piotr Pych, Michał Radlowski, Jarosław Ruciński, Michal Glebicki, Jarosław Ruciński, Marta Rudna, Krzysztof Setniewski, Marta Szymanska, Patryk Wlodarczyk, Karol Wozniak
Localization Testers Sofiane Boukoffa, Henryk Borzymowski, Richard Borzymowski, Marco Caponi, Alexandre Corbin, Thomas Hensel, Roberto Hongo, Leszek Jaworowski, Emilia Kleinrok, Guillermo Alvarez Lloret, Ignazio Mineccia, Piotr Mugerman, Pavel Revinski, Pawel Rogala, Wojciech Rokita, Emilio Rull, Polina Rutkowska, Aliaksei Sivuda, Martin Slusarek, Emilio Spanu, Paweł Szczęsny, Krzysztof Wiśniewski

Good news, Obsidian internal QA, Swedes, and contracted potatoes, Chris says that you should get paid the same as the Obsidian devs! That 4 million they got from Kickstarter gonna cover all this?

spoken like someone who doesn’t play games on release and instead waits a year so that the audience can catch all the bugs the underfunded QA department missed.

Wunderbar's response is mine.

But the nature of QA is that almost nobody sees it as a permanent career and so people don't stick around for very long, which leads to hiring practices being very lax on requirements, or else there wouldn't be anybody to do the job.

Then there's the Bioware method, where they squeezed guys liked Priestly and Woo dry, and then guilt-tripped them into quitting with negative performance reviews so they didn't have to pay unemployment benefits for canning them. I can only hope there was at least one person they tried to pull that on who would have accepted nothing less than being laid off or fired.

OTOH you had Obsidian who recognized and promoted quality hires from QA, e.g. that alleged-decent-writer Scokel.

 

[Efe]

bioware woo, isnt that the guy banning everyone that disagrees or criticizes on bioware forums?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

QLOC S.A.
General Manager Adam Piesiak
Business Development Director Paweł Grzywaczewski
Director of Account Management Paweł Ziajka
Account Managers Marta Olejniczak, Jakub Trudzik
Head of Quality Assurance Sergiusz Ślosarczyk
QA Project Managers Marcin Górniak, Maciej Mazurek
QA Lab Managers Bartosz Antecki, Pawel Strzelczyk
QA Team Leaders Konrad Kołacki, Paweł Krawczuk, Michał Mugerman
QA Testers Ewa Angielska, Małgorzata Barkowska, Piotr Brodowski, Rafał Dąbrowski, Maciej Florysiak, Paweł Jaskólski, Sebastian Kocyłak, Joanna Kucharzyk, Rafał Lipski, Łukasz Mazur, Piotr Pych, Michał Radlowski, Jarosław Ruciński, Michal Glebicki, Jarosław Ruciński, Marta Rudna, Krzysztof Setniewski, Marta Szymanska, Patryk Wlodarczyk, Karol Wozniak
Localization Testers Sofiane Boukoffa, Henryk Borzymowski, Richard Borzymowski, Marco Caponi, Alexandre Corbin, Thomas Hensel, Roberto Hongo, Leszek Jaworowski, Emilia Kleinrok, Guillermo Alvarez Lloret, Ignazio Mineccia, Piotr Mugerman, Pavel Revinski, Pawel Rogala, Wojciech Rokita, Emilio Rull, Polina Rutkowska, Aliaksei Sivuda, Martin Slusarek, Emilio Spanu, Paweł Szczęsny, Krzysztof Wiśniewski

those names
I'm sure he was just as vocal when the company he was working for outsourced their QA to a country with rock-bottom labor costs

 

[Irata]

I highly suspect the art team isn't paid nearly the same as the ones who do coding. So which tier does he want them bumped up to?

 

[c2007]

Woo and Priestly were garbage employees.

I just looked at Priestly's Twitter... Former former former. Makes you think...

Woo, please.

 

[Roguey]

Woo and Priestly were garbage employees.

I just looked at Priestly's Twitter... Former former former. Makes you think...

Woo, please.

They were both kept on as forum moderators even after they quit since they did it for free.

There's really no way of determing what they were like as QA testers. Bioware was certainly satisfied with their performance for years until they weren't.

 

[c2007]

Woo and Priestly were garbage employees.

I just looked at Priestly's Twitter... Former former former. Makes you think...

Woo, please.

They were both kept on as forum moderators even after they quit since they did it for free.

There's really no way of determing what they were like as QA testers. Bioware was certainly satisfied with their performance for years until they weren't.

Well... I can't argue with you there. NinjaStan banned me a dozen times probably, mostly for a day or two. We would actually have dialogs in the interim; on the whole he is probably a better dude than his fame has made him out to be.

That said he kinda earned it.

 

[HanoverF]

Considering Feargus used to be QA I'm surprised Chris doesn't condone treating them worse.

 

[Neanderthal]

Woo and Priestly were garbage employees.

I just looked at Priestly's Twitter... Former former former. Makes you think...

Woo, please.

They were both kept on as forum moderators even after they quit since they did it for free.

There's really no way of determing what they were like as QA testers. Bioware was certainly satisfied with their performance for years until they weren't.

I remember when CDPR hired Priestly, went down like proverbial lead balloon, think he only lasted a few week.

 

[Flou]

OTOH you had Obsidian who recognized and promoted quality hires from QA, e.g. that alleged-decent-writer Scokel.

Out of your list Connor Richards and Nick Carver have both been promoted to a design job + countless others during the years have been promoted to various roles. I think that is something Obsidian actually does well.

 

[Prime Junta]

I know from second-hand experience that literally anyone with a high school degree can apply for a QA job and get one. It's not even remotely on the level of skill required of a programmer or an artist.

A good QA is worth a dozen mediocre programmers. It requires an unusual set of characteristics: the creativity and investigative ability of a scientist, the technical skills of an engineer, the conscientiousness of a surgeon, and the tolerance for rote repetition of an assembly line worker. I’m fortunate enough to work with one. If I had to fire all but three of my colleagues she’d be one of the ones I’d keep. We pay her the same rate as a senior programmer.

It is true that a bad programmer requires marginally more training than a bad QA. OTOH a bad programmer has negative productivity while a bad QA’s productivity cannot be below zero. Worst case is they’re useless, not actively harmful.

 

[Ninjerk]

Someone's worked QA....

 

[Prime Junta]

Someone's worked QA....

Technically yes since we went a long while before we had any dedicated QAs so I had to do my own, which SUCKED.

I've never had it on my job description though, and I wouldn't be good at it -- I lack the patience and tolerance for rote repetition.

 

[Riddler]

Also, quite often the line between QA and test engineer gets pretty blurry. I don't think I have ever worked at a company that had people that only sat around doing testing.

"QA" can mean a lot but of course the lowliest QA monkey shouldn't be paid the same as a full stack developer.

 

[Prime Junta]

Also, quite often the line between QA and test engineer gets pretty blurry. I don't think I have ever worked at a company that had people that only sat around doing testing.

"QA" can mean a lot but of course the lowliest QA monkey shouldn't be paid the same as a full stack developer.

Different levels of competence are usually associated with different levels of pay, yes.

 

[Sergiu64]

I've never had it on my job description though, and I wouldn't be good at it -- I lack the patience and tolerance for rote repetition.

She should get into Automation if there's still a lot of repetition in her tests as well.

 

[Prime Junta]

I've never had it on my job description though, and I wouldn't be good at it -- I lack the patience and tolerance for rote repetition.

She should get into Automation if there's still a lot of repetition in her tests as well.

Oh, she's automated everything that can be automated. There's still way too much tedium for my blood though as not everything can.