if there's one thing I wish more of the game industry understood, it's that tightly-embedded QA staffers who understand the game, its goals, and how it's made, can make the process of bugfixing SO MUCH faster than just throwing bodies at a problem and hoping you get enough reports
throw my better self overboard
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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:
You could probably just extrapolate this out to "I wish the games industry considered people valuable"
We weren't making games, but at my old company fully 2 of 6 of the tech team were full-time testers and it was so worth it.
100% valid, but also can be harder than it sounds on paper even if you have the buy-in to make it happen. A lot of other things not being done well can make setting up such a tester for success way harder (primarily training them on context and keeping them engaged with features evolving over time), though the things that make that hard also make the entire project hard for everyone and development bad in general, so it's just a shit soup.
My first studio was small, a couple testers quite embedded with the whole team, but the insane velocity of the projects meant them not always being able to keep abreast of context during more intense periods. I feel like a lot of ideals of better QA rely on project-level ideals that benefit other elements of the team and project, but so many large teams seem to fail at so many fundamentals and then soooo many consequences roll out from there.
i think one of the risks with embedded qa is that some programmers are always going to treat it as an adversarial relationship, and less distance means you often take the brunt of their frustration.
the bugs are in the game regardless, but by reporting them, you as qa are "giving them more work", you are "preventing them from hitting a deadline". by finding ways to break their design, you are "questioning their ability".
spicy take but IMO anyone who acts like that is actively bad at their job
So, in my experience, this is MORE of a problem with external QA, and the only times I've really seen in on internal QA is when that internal QA doesn't spend time with the team they QA for. If you don't build a relationship with someone and all you ever see is their name nitpicking you it's easy to feel adversarial. But if you actually work with them all the time like any other programmer, designer, artist, or other discipline, you build an understanding with them over time.
100% this -- the best antidote to the adversarial relationship is having everyone sit next to each other and spend time together and get to know each other as people.
i guess i don't know how to emphasize that this can and does very often still happen even if you do that
don't be silly, anyone who's taken business 101 can tell you that QA testers are a fungible asset