TestronicYour Partner in Quality

The Challenges of Quality Assurance for an Ever-Changing Product

Erik HittenhausenHead of Functionality & Compliance QA – Games (Testronic)

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• Traditional Retail

ONE chance to get it right

• New Business Models

Multiple opportunities to screw up

The Challenges

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Traditional Retail

A project with a defined scope, start and end date.

Updates and patches post-release do not have to be tied to strict deadlines

Quality upon release main benchmark

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New Business ModelsMobile and Free To Play

• An on-going project, with ever increasing scope

• To stay successful and competitive the product has to be updated at regular intervals

• Consistency of quality main benchmark

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Multiple releases means multiple risks

Risks involved in New Business Models

• Breaking live environment

• Bad patch leads to negative social media and press coverage

• Compliance: changing requirements of platform holders

• Compatibility: keeping up with the latest hardware

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How to deal with the challenges

• Build and retain a core QA team

• Establish and define a synchronous Release and QA cycle

• Develop and maintain an evolving test plan

• Break down the product

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Build and retain a core QA TeamMore stable resourcing of QA teams is key

• Retain your core team

• An experienced dedicated team helps to retain a working knowledge of the product allowing efficiency gains to keep up with the growing scope/content of the product

• Specialising people and embedding expertise (exploratory testers, playthrough wizards, compatibility, compliance)

• Capatilise on experience and efficiency by effective test planning and checklist creation

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Release and QA cycle

Establish and define a synchronous Release and QA cycle

• Example 2 week cycle: compliance passes

compatibility passes

one exhaustive pass of all features and content

continuous scripted and exploratory testing of features and content under going development

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Break down the test focus and optimise the QA cycle by identifying which content is affected by updates:

Planning / Legacy Content vs. New Content

• Stable Content Content already tested and unaffected by ongoing

development can be re-tested once throughout the QA cycle

• Changing Content Existing content which is being changed, updated or

expanded, understand what is affected

• New Content Content that is being added and may interact with stable

and/or changing content and must be tested continuously