2002-10-28: Comments from QA's TranSendze
Comments from QA's TranSendze
Oct 28 2002 4:06PM
This was originally posted to Quality Assurance at uo.com.[1]
Hi, this is TranSendze from Origin’s QA dept. I’m a gamer from the old days, and have been playing and working on multiplayer games since they were text-based. I can remember the sweet sound of dings and dongs as I logged in at 1200 BAUD to whatever MUD I was going crazy over at the time.
I began working at Origin in September of 2001 as a QA tester, and have since moved on to more engineering-oriented tasks. My main focus has been on creating tools that remove some of the pencil-pushing QA has to do, and assist in gathering metrics, which is a necessary task to be able to actually see what worked and what didn’t, and keep improving our processes. I have recently joined a QA Engineering team that is working on a new project within the QA department to help automate some of the aspects of testing Ultima Online.
Many of the tasks we do in QA are quite repetitive, and, in order to catch as many bugs as possible, must be done with each build of the UO client. Having testers spend their time on repetitive and fairly mundane tests takes away from the time they can spend on finding the bugs that take real brain power to reveal. This problem is being addressed through the creation of the Automated Regression Testing system, or ‘ART’.
ART will allow certain aspects of testing the UO client to be automated. As a result of this, we can improve the speed of bug detection through constant day and night testing of the client. This will free QA to spend more time finding bugs, and as a result, produce a higher quality game. Although ART is currently being designed specifically for client testing, the ideas behind it are going to become a part of our overall testing strategy.
If you are wondering how ART will affect you as a player, think of it this way: ART frees up QA time for additional bug smashing, Development spends less time waiting on QA for approval and more time being code monkeys, and content and bug fixes reach players faster and at a higher quality.
So eat cake, drink sake, and cheer ART.
TranSendze
Quality Assurance
Origin Systems
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