Level Up Your Game Testing: 6 Best Quality Engineering Practices for Success
The global gaming market is booming, led by innovators in Japan, China, and the U.S. As competition intensifies, delivering flawless, immersive experiences is critical. The rising demand for specialist game testing companies reflects this need for seamless, bug-free gameplay.
With augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (AR, VR and MR) raising gamer expectations, testing has become more complex and crucial than ever. Quality engineering plays a pivotal role in this process. It provides the expertise and strategic approach needed to meet these challenges, ensuring rigorous validation and a smooth player experience.
Here are six best practices to elevate your game testing with quality engineering and ensure success:
1. Implement a structured framework
A structured quality engineering framework serves as a roadmap, guiding professionals through each phase of the validation process. It ensures no aspect of the game goes untested, enhancing efficiency and maintaining consistency across different versions.
This framework includes a detailed plan outlining specific objectives, scope, required resources, and timelines. Ideally, this plan should align with the development schedule, allowing quality engineering and development to progress in tandem.
Game quality engineering providers often use standardized templates and checklists, providing clear guidelines on what needs to be validated and how. Additionally, a structured framework facilitates better tracking of discovered issues and their status.
2. Embrace automation
Efficient and effective validation of game components is crucial, and automation plays a vital role in this process. It lets you execute repetitive tasks quickly and accurately, with minimal human intervention.
Start by identifying areas within your gaming software that could benefit from automation, such as regression testing, where the same areas must be tested repeatedly. Select automation tools that integrate well with your development environment and can handle the complexities of game scenarios.
Once you’ve chosen the right tools, create a suite of automated test cases that can be reused across different game versions, saving time and effort. However, it’s essential to strike a balance between automated and manual validation, as some aspects, like visual appeal and story coherence, require human judgment.
3. Introduce continuous integration and quality engineering
Continuous integration and quality engineering can enhance the agility of your development team, enabling faster iterations and a more adaptive game development process. This approach aligns well with the dynamic nature of game development and ensures a higher-quality product.
In this methodology, automated validations are integrated into the software development pipeline. New code submissions undergo automatic and continuous testing, allowing defects to be identified early in the development cycle, reducing costs and the time needed to fix them.
Implementing continuous integration and quality engineering requires a robust infrastructure where code can be merged to a shared repository several times a day, triggering an automated build and validation sequence. This setup helps ensure the game’s codebase remains stable and changes or new features don’t disrupt existing functionality.
4. Prioritize test data management
Effective test data management solutions are crucial for optimizing the quality engineering process, especially as games and gaming software become more complex and data-driven.
Modern approaches to test data management emphasize a continuous, dynamic flow of information, ensuring the testing environment closely mimics real-world gaming conditions — a crucial factor for accurate validation outcomes.
Start by establishing a clear strategy for generating, managing, storing, and disposing of test data. Enhance efficiency by automating the generation of test data, allowing engineers to quickly and accurately recreate specific scenarios. Use tools that can simulate different game states, player actions, or network conditions, which is particularly useful for dynamic game validation.
Securing test data is also essential, especially when dealing with games containing personal player information. Ensure your test data is anonymized or encrypted to prevent potential breaches. Last, maintain the quality of your test data through regular audits and updates, ensuring it remains relevant and effective as the game evolves.
5. Perform thorough user experience validation
User experience (UX) validation is a highly important step in the game development process. This is because it focuses on how players interact with the game.
UX validation is more than simply bug identification. It aims to understand the players’ emotional and behavioral responses, responses that can significantly impact the game’s success.
If you are testing your game’s UX, try various validation methods, including:
· Usability testing: Observe players interacting with the game. Identify issues with the interface or mechanics that could hamper their experience.
· A/B testing: Compare various game aspects to each other. Find out which features or designs elicit better player reactions and engagement.
· Beta testing: Gather qualitative feedback through surveys and interviews. Beta testing, where players test the game in its development stage, can give you valuable insights into player preferences and areas for improvement.
Once done, integrate these UX improvements iteratively throughout the game development process. This will enable continuous refinement and adaptation to player feedback. It ultimately results in a more polished final product.
6. Execute cross-platform compatibility validation
Players want to access games through various devices and platforms. This could be PCs, consoles, or mobile devices. Cross-platform compatibility validation is an important aspect for game developers. It ensures your game delivers a seamless and consistent experience no matter the platform. This is critical for maintaining a strong user base.
Define the range of platforms and device configurations your game will support, including different operating systems, hardware specifications, and screen resolutions. Use automated tools to simulate game performance across these configurations, identifying discrepancies in gameplay, graphics, or user interface.
Invest in both physical and virtual test environments to assess the game’s performance. While emulators offer a preliminary check, testing on real devices is indispensable for understanding the true user experience. For multiplayer games, focus on validating network conditions across platforms, ensuring seamless interaction for all players regardless of their device. This involves checking synchronization, data transfer rates, and latency issues.
Key takeaways
Integrating these six quality engineering practices can boost your game quality. It ensures a well-rounded, engaging, and adaptable gaming experience that resonates with players across various platforms and environments.
Qualitest understands the complexities of gaming software and the importance of delivering high-quality player experiences.
Our solutions, including Qualiframe and Qualiview, offer comprehensive gaming testing automation capabilities. These tools can simulate real-world scenarios, identify visual defects, and streamline the validation process, ensuring your games meet the highest quality and performance standards.
Take your game testing to the next level with quality engineering. With the right approach and strategic help from game testing companies, you can create gaming experiences that’ll leave a winning impression on players worldwide.
