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Postmortem: Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz  Lack of In-House QA Lead
Because we outsourced our testing to a professional testing company, we neglected to hire an internal QA manager, and this proved to be one of our biggest stumbling blocks. The external company did a fine job, but without a QA lead in-house to manage our own testing process and make suggestions to the outsourced team, our testing was not as directed and effective as it could have been. Halfway through the project, we hired an in-house testing intern and even recruited our art team to help with the QA process, but they faced a similar problem – without any structured guidance, they were just testing blindly. Because of it, we were still finding and fixing not-so-minor bugs up until a week before our PC release. This never would have happened had we had an in-house QA lead. In addition, we should have developed a rigorous, automated test suite. Without automated testing, every bug fix had a greater potential of introducing hidden bugs into the game, and this cost us a lot of time when regression issues weren't identified until long after they were introduced. The lesson here is that we needed to have at least one experienced QA person in the company dedicated to nothing but testing, no matter how good our external testing solution was.
ConclusionPassion, talent, great partners, and perseverance are what ultimately enabled us to realize the dream of RoboBlitz. Looking back, we were fairly inexperienced going into this project and learned a bit more than expected, but that’s the way it goes with inexperience – you don’t know what you don’t know. Despite all the setbacks, our conviction and dedication were strong, and we managed to pull together a game of which our entire team is proud. We hope everyone will enjoy playing RoboBlitz as much as we enjoyed making it, and stay tuned for our upcoming physics-based multiplayer madness!
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