Modern Game Testing: A Pragmatic Guide to Test Planning and Strategy

Want to write great test plans for video games?

Focusing exclusively on the unique challenges of video game testing, you’ll discover how modern game companies create test plans and strategies for large and complex games, and learn the foolproof techniques and processes created for and used by real-world game teams.

Packed with expert advice and real-life examples, you’ll find this book invaluable if you want to improve your own or your team’s feature test plans and catch more bugs. It’s also a great guide for testers looking to move into a test writing role.

Inside you’ll find all the know-how you’ll need to own the end-to-end test strategy for game features, including:

• identifying what should be tested for each game feature
• designing tests with clear instructions for effective test execution
• how to approach testing for a range of common game features
• a toolbox of test planning techniques to guide the test planning process

All equipping you to organise and communicate your plans within any project team. Complete with practical examples, working templates and industry tales from real projects, Modern Game Testing assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, tackling each area with logical, easy-to-follow steps.

By the end of the book, you’ll have a sufficiently broad and deep knowledge to be able to write test plans for all the most common game features

What will you learn?

Before diving into the details of test planning, you’ll learn the fundamentals of testing which will equip you with a sufficient knowledge base to understand complex topics more clearly. This chapter explains the ‘why’ behind game testing and through understanding the core principles of testing you will have a sharper focus throughout all of your testing work.

This chapter explains the day-to-day and month-to-month cadence of project life, providing a holistic understanding of how game development projects are structured. Understanding milestone definitions and project phases will enable you to align your test plans with the wider project milestones.

Being able to articulate testing activities is a prerequisite skill to effective test writing. Here we’ll categorise and define all of the most widely used testing terminology, clearing confusion and identifying commonly misused terms.

Learning these techniques will help you identify what should be tested for each feature. Test analysis techniques logically derive test cases, removing the need for the test writer to recall every interesting test scenario from their past experience. With these new tools in your testing toolbox, you will be able to create test plans for a broader range of game features.

This chapter covers the end-to-end process of creating a new test plan structure and writing effective tests without ambiguity or unnecessary bloat. Here you’ll learn how to identify the most effective approach for each part of the plan; be it a scripted test, an exploratory session, an automated test or other approaches.

Great test writing doesn’t just require a toolbox full of test techniques, it requires a broad knowledge of game feature areas. This section provides a primer for 23 of the most common game feature components, helping you understand the difficulty, characteristics, gotchas and test approach when testing each game area.

An introduction to more advanced topics, here you’ll learn how to estimate tester resources for your test plans and add them to the project test schedule. Think holistically about the readiness of the test plan, feature implementation, tester availability and how your work fits into the wider test strategy for the project.