The sphere of e-entertainment is constantly developing and becoming more and more popular. One of the means of this industry is games. Probably, nowadays the game industry is more in-demand than ever. Some of the game development companies became real giants of the IT market. There even are the international game competitions where the prize money is rather huge.
But all that will not be possible without a high quality of the software products. At every stage of the development process, the test team performs a specified type of checking in order to ensure the proper functioning. But there are several differences between testing software and games. In short, all types of game testing are performed according to the black box technique.
Five Steps of Game Testing
- Test planning and designing. Before proceeding to the actual testing, the specialists should review and analyze the scope of checking, system capacities, product peculiarities, etc.; have everything documented.
- Test cases writing. The test team should provide the full test coverage by creating test suites and scenarios.
- Test run. Every designed test case is run in order to detect possible bugs and mismatches to the available specifications.
- Bugs reporting. If an issue is discovered, then the specialist opens it in a bug-tracker, add its description, steps to reproduce and provide screenshots or video files if necessary.
- Fixing of issues and retesting. The development team removes the detected bugs and the test team makes sure that the issues are totally fixed without any side effects.
It is a cyclic process as the developers create new builds that may contain new bugs. The execution procedure of game testing has a structured manner.
What Is a Structure of Game Testing?
- Pre-production. At the very beginning of the project start, a test plan document is created. The checking procedure does not begin when the code is written and the product is ready. Proper test documentation ensures the fast testing and bug fixing.
- Kickoff. A test kickoff gives the opportunity to improve test quality, test execution and test understanding.
- Alpha. It is the beginning of an actual testing. At this stage, the parts of software are integrated and the first full version of the game is ready. It should be tested from the very beginning till its end.
- Beta. After all features are added, the game logic is fully realized and UI is complete, beta testing is performed.
- Gold. After beta testing is finished, then it goes the stage of code freezing and testing of the final game build starts. Gold testing ensures that all critical issues are not reproducible.
- Release. At this stage, the game is delivered to the end users. It is considered that at this stage the product quality is good enough for mass distribution.
- Post-release. Some bugs can be discovered after the release stage and it is the time for the update or patch.