 | Quality Assurance |
| Oghma Steps into the Spotlight | Jan 21 2004 2:58PM |
| Hello this is Oghma, Process Lead for the Quality Assurance department at Origin Systems. You may remember me from some of my former roles as a Game Master, Senior GM, and GM Team Lead for the Player Relations department. Starting in July of 1998, I spent roughly three years serving UO as a player relations representative, and I try to use the knowledge I gained "in the trenches" to avoid past mistakes and continue to improve the world of Ultima. My current duties are varied and numerous and most occur completely out of sight from you, the players. I spend much of my time documenting and testing publish processes, as well as creating new process documents as they are needed. It has been said the best a Quality Assurance department can hope for is to not be noticed--meaning, in a perfect world, the game systems all work together flawlessly and no one thinks to question why. What QA does for UO, I try to do for QA by working behind the scenes to help the game run more smoothly. We have some very exciting things in the works that I am not at liberty to discuss just yet, but I look forward to working on UO for at least another five years. Oghma QA Process Lead Origin Systems Inc. | |
| Usul on Bug Reporting | Jun 25 2003 12:03PM |
| Has someone ever given you directions to his or her house, but left out one crucial detail, such as forgetting to mention that final left turn? The error from the perspective of the person giving the directions is very minor and is easily corrected once the mistake is realized. However, the error from the perspective of the person trying to follow the flawed directions has a much greater impact. This person will probably get lost, frustrated, and will most likely be late to the desired destination. This example of leaving out a seemingly minor detail is highly applicable to bug reporting. When a player discovers a bug, that player is going be intimately familiar with the details surrounding the bug. This is similar to the person giving directions in the example above. You know exactly how to get to your own house, but it is second nature to you, making it easy to overlook or forget important details when communicating directions to another person. When reporting a bug, it is very easy to forget to mention what client you were using, or on what shard you were testing it. For the most part, these details are going to be a constant for you; they don’t change very often, making them easy to take for granted when submitting a bug report. We investigate and attempt to reproduce every bug submitted to us through UO Bugs and TC Bugs. However, we can only do this to the extent that we have reliable and detailed information regarding the bug. Exact steps to reproduce the bug are extremely important. Take a step back and ask yourself, "If I had never seen this bug before, would these steps be sufficient to accurately reproduce the issue?" Your machine specifications, along with which client you were using, on which shard you were playing, and relevant map coordinates are all important pieces of information as well. Below are some guidelines that should help you help us make the most of your bug reporting efforts.
Thanks! Craig "Usul" McDonald Quality Assurance Lead Ultima Online | |
| Comments from QA's TranSendze | Oct 28 2002 4:06PM |
| Hi, this is TranSendze from Origin’s QA dept. I’m a gamer from the old days, and have been playing and working on multiplayer games since they were text-based. I can remember the sweet sound of dings and dongs as I logged in at 1200 BAUD to whatever MUD I was going crazy over at the time. I began working at Origin in September of 2001 as a QA tester, and have since moved on to more engineering-oriented tasks. My main focus has been on creating tools that remove some of the pencil-pushing QA has to do, and assist in gathering metrics, which is a necessary task to be able to actually see what worked and what didn’t, and keep improving our processes. I have recently joined a QA Engineering team that is working on a new project within the QA department to help automate some of the aspects of testing Ultima Online. Many of the tasks we do in QA are quite repetitive, and, in order to catch as many bugs as possible, must be done with each build of the UO client. Having testers spend their time on repetitive and fairly mundane tests takes away from the time they can spend on finding the bugs that take real brain power to reveal. This problem is being addressed through the creation of the Automated Regression Testing system, or ‘ART’. ART will allow certain aspects of testing the UO client to be automated. As a result of this, we can improve the speed of bug detection through constant day and night testing of the client. This will free QA to spend more time finding bugs, and as a result, produce a higher quality game. Although ART is currently being designed specifically for client testing, the ideas behind it are going to become a part of our overall testing strategy. If you are wondering how ART will affect you as a player, think of it this way: ART frees up QA time for additional bug smashing, Development spends less time waiting on QA for approval and more time being code monkeys, and content and bug fixes reach players faster and at a higher quality. So eat cake, drink sake, and cheer ART. TranSendze Quality Assurance Origin Systems | |
| Comments from QA's Russell O'Henly | Apr 12 2002 12:21PM |
| Hello from the QA Department here at Origin. My name is Russell O’Henly. I’ve been playing computer games since I was about 10 years old. Back then, the Commodore 64 was the gaming system of choice, and I played every game I could find. I found myself getting a job at a video rental place when I turned 16, which was right about the time that console games started their rental market. During college, I had a fulltime job at a company that sold new and used computer games for the PC. At one time or another, I had tried every game we had available for sale. After that, it was a job building computers for a large hardware distributor which helped me to keep my frequent PC upgrades on the cheap side (nothing like that employee wholesale discount!). Obviously, the next step was to find a way to play games for a living, right? So here I am! Actually, there’s a lot more to testing for OSI than just playing UO all day long. I’ve been doing Quality Assurance at OSI now for almost a year, mostly assigned to test the "ongoing content" or "scenarios". My job consists of studying design documentation created by the development team, creating test suites based on those designs (which are basically step-by-step instructions for other testers to follow to make sure that all the functionality of whatever is in the design documentation works correctly), and keeping track of what has been tested (and how many times). Working with the Ongoing Content Development team is extremely rewarding. This is mainly because I get to see all the new creatures, all the new map changes, and all the new systems and puzzles AS they are being created. As a tester, testing new content is particularly challenging because no one has ever seen it before. I must try to think of everything that could possibly go wrong with new systems to make sure that nothing goes wrong once it reaches the shards. As a gamer, it is a total rush to have the privilege to be one of the first people to experience new changes to Ultima Online. There’s nothing like seeing a new aspect of a game being created and come to life right before your eyes, and then seeing all of the players’ reactions when they finally get to see it all. Time for me to get back to work! =) Russell O’Henly OSI Quality Assurance | |
| Grok Speaks | Mar 1 2002 11:10AM |
| Greetings all! I'm Grok, Quality Assurance Tester. This is an exciting time, as I'm sure you know. We released the Lord Blackthorn's Revenge expansion on the twelfth of February. This release is the culmination of many months of hard work and long hours, and we are finally seeing the fruits of our labors. I don't need to recite the feature list of LBR as they are lauded in numerous other places. Instead, I'll focus on QA's role in bringing the product to store shelves. First off, our unofficial motto in QA is: "Silence is louder than applause". What this means is that if we've done our job, no one notices. While this may not seem to be the most glorious position, I am certainly extremely proud of our contribution. This was my first shipped title, and I couldn't have picked a better project to work on. QA as a whole has spent many a late night in the office making sure LBR had as successful a release as possible. I've been with Origin for almost ten months now, and the last few months have easily been the most exciting. Since I've been here, we have released LBR and have gone through three major publishes. However, our Fan Event was by far the most fun and exciting project I've participated in as of yet. I played UO for over 2 years, and participating in the event and talking to all the players was an amazingly nostalgic experience. I really enjoyed talking with those of you who were there. In fact, it was actually helpful as I got a better idea of the mindset of the hardcore player base and have a new outlook on what shape the players feel the game should take in the future. That's about it for me, but as I'm now in charge of reviewing bug reports we receive in both the uobugs@uo.com and tcbugs@uo.com mailboxes, I feel obligated to make a few statements regarding the function of those boxes. First, I would like to make it abundantly clear that I read every single report I receive. Second, when submitting a bug report, please-please-please provide steps to reproduce whatever issue you are reporting. The quicker we can make the issue occur on our side, the sooner that issue will be fixed. And finally, if you need immediate help with an issue, we have specific support groups which are described at http://support.uo.com. These specialized teams are trained and eager to assist. Grok Quality Assurance Tester Origin Systems | |
