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This article at Next-Gen.biz describes how Dave Perry thinks that the time of testers is almost over, and that automated testing and community testers will do away with professional game testers altogether.
Personally I don’t believe this for a minute; there’s a lot more to testing than just playing the game over and over, and I can’t see even twenty random gamers doing a better job than one professional tester. For one there’s the question of average punters having the discipline to do proper testing and not just run around playing the game. Our testers do a lot more than just testing too; they monitor build stability, hunt down those responsible for memory leaks, and a bunch of other miscellaneous tasks.
We’ve started doing automated testing too – having a bot run around the game on each build carrying out a list of tasks. It’s definitely useful and does pick up bugs, but I can’t see any automated test being thorough enough to be able to replace the human ability of thinking up the more obscure ways of breaking the game.
Any thoughts?
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cant see pro testers being outta jobs.
1: reckon it would take as long to program a bot to do the testing as good as a pro tester, as you’d have to give the bot a list of task relevant to that game.
2: you’d have to write a list of results for the bot.
3: also you’d have to have soemthing testing the bots to make sure their behaving correctly. so who’s gonna test that? another bot, and you see the problem unravel…also as satchmo said testers do alot more, spot graphical glitches in huds etc (hows a bot going to do that, well i have an idea but its largely unfeasible for a game), track leaks etc.
Also is a programmed bot going to tell ya, "hang on the sun is blue instead of orange"?? Or the cars wheels arent rotating…
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Yes if done correctly a automated testing can do all of that. I think there is a reluctance in the games industry to do automated testing, be it because of the tight deadlines,laziness or ego’s the uptake on automated testing is simply not there. People were shocked when I told them all of 1944 has automated tests.
That said its not a substitute for an actual tester, but rather it helps them in allowing them to do far more tests in their working day, while the Automated tests work towards ensuring that existing test cases are functioning correctly. (Yes all of this was drilled into me at Ericsson’s and I live by it now)
I would assume it is more likely that open beta’s will be the new way to test. Where a partial product is released and everyone can grab it and report bugs.
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It will be interesting to see how the gradual dimise of game testing will affect the structure of the industry. 70% of people start off in the industry in a testing position. While aspirants can develop mod projects and test games online, there’s still going to be a serious gap between ‘wannabe’ and professional programmer/artist/etc.
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Nothing is going to replace a good tester, they’re invaluable, and a rare breed…
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So this games testing – is it a testing job? :P
Sorry, had to!
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Perhaps there will be more community based testing done by MMO’s but there is also more jobs being created for Community support roles in MMO’s.
You can expect community based support to be done for free by the community, you just can’t expect it to work for very long before the complaints begin.
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