Quality assurance processes

Having quality assurance (QA) procedures in place for your game project is important and will help to keep an overview of the problems and issues in your game. No matter how thorough your work is and how prepared you are, there will always be bugs. The quality assurance part of your production pipeline is not supposed to make sure there are no bugs, but rather help you decide how to manage the bugs you will encounter in the course of your project.

The QA workflow of your production pipeline should be tailored to the size of your project. A small two-man team working on a CryENGINE mod will require a different approach than a 100-man team working on an AAA title. Depending on your team and project size, your solution could be anything from simply writing bugs down on a piece of paper to entering bugs into an online bug tracking system.

QA pipeline in larger scale teams

First, let's have a look at how professional large scale teams set up their QA pipeline. In those types of production environments, found in most AAA studios today, a bug will go through many stages before it is finally fixed.

QA pipeline in larger scale teams

QA pipeline in larger scale teams

You can see that this process is rather complex and involves many stages and possibly various people being involved.

A bug, also commonly called an issue, gets identified, confirmed, fixed, and then finally closed. Usually a bug-tracking software such as JIRA or Bugzilla is used to manage the issues.

The benefit of this process often employed by larger-sized teams is that it is very thorough. Working this way will make sure almost every bug will get caught, documented, and fixed.

This is a good approach if you work with a development team of a larger size and need to handle larger amounts of bugs. The bug tracking system you decide to use will depend on your specific needs and your available budget.

QA pipeline in smaller teams

If you are working in a smaller team, maybe with just one or two other people, your QA approach will be a bit different. It might be sufficient for you to just write down the issue in an issue tracking system and then revisit and fix the bug at a later time.

QA pipeline in smaller teams

QA pipeline in smaller teams

Working without a QA pipeline

If you decide to work on your project without setting up any QA pipeline at all, you will sooner or later run into problems, since even small projects can produce a lot of bugs and issues.

Simply saying "I'll remember this bug and will fix it later" might sound easy but is not practical. No matter how thorough you are, if you do not track your issues properly, you will eventually end up shipping your game with them.

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