Game Testing: Partnering for Quality

Reliability, quality assurance at competitive costs make iXie the ideal testing partner for this video games publisher.

CLIENT PROFILE
A leading global firm based in the US was developing a software tool for workforce management, employee attendance marking, collecting labour data and generating attendance summary of a large workforce. The software was developed using .NET technologies and AJAX and Oracle 10G was the database used.
The client was scouting around for the right testing partner, one who had the capability to manage the testing process at rapid speed, without sacrificing quality. Importantly, the QA team at the client site wanted a 100% automation-driven testing process, to reduce time-to-release, for every build.  Also, the project needed handling of multiple data sets for a highly data intensive application.

KNOWLEDGE CHALLENGES
The client had attempted to create an in-house testing team but faced certain hurdles:

• Games need to be tested on the right devices for accurate quality assurance. For this, the client needed to invest in the devices, which would become redundant after the game was released.
• The second challenge was to hire key, experienced QA personnel, which added to the costs.
• Assets also add to overhead costs, an additional drain on the finances of the publishing company.
• In-house testing would dilute the focus of the company from publishing to managing the testing assets.

The ideal solution was to look for a testing partner with its own asset base to outsource quality assurance too.

ADVANTAGE iXie
Some of the qualities the publisher for including:

• The asset base
• The experience level
• Cost competitiveness

iXie’s game testing proved to be the right fit for the client because of our experience in testing across devices.
We were able to perform testing on:

• Our testing lab houses mobile devices and Tablets of all kinds – Android, iOS, Windows and Amazon Kindle
• We also have gaming PCs & Laptops to support game titles
• We have experienced personnel, averaging 12 years of experience in game testing.

BENEFITS OF USING iSAFE
One of iXie’s key and standard approaches to testing is to work closely with the client’s third party developers in planning and executing the project, interacting with them in real time. Our key ingredients for testing success are:

PLANNING
Our work was mapped out to include testing for:

• Functionality
• Compatibility
• Compliance
• Regressions
• Smoke
• Test case preparation

COMMUNICATION
We maintained communication with the client, thus retaining their trust and updating them of progress periodically through multiple tiers:

• Chat based – Skype, Slack
• Audio conferencing bridges
• Video conferencing bridges
• Email communication
• Bug database (JIRA/Mantis)