I recently found and joined The Software Testing Club, an online community of software testers. The site has some very good video interviews of leaders in the industry.
As I watch each of these, I will write up a brief and share it here on our blog.
The first one I watched is with Jane Fraser, QA Director, of gaming company Electronic Arts. It is only 2.5 minutes long and covers 6 questions.
Here is the summary:
- Q: What are some of the challenges facing software quality testers? A: Creating great teams that do great work.
- Q: What are some of the biggest problems/bugs you’ve come across? A: Mostly usability and making the games fun.
- Q: How do you see agile testing affecting the process? A: Big impact – getting into the projects sooner.
- Q: What’s the toughest bug you encountered QA’ing your own products? A: Reproducing bugs because the games are so complex.
- Q: Do you think automated tools can help testers? A: Must be a mix of people and tools; no one tool is the best – each one solves a specific need.
- Q: When is testing done? A: Probably never. We let the producers decide if quality is high enough to ship the product.
I really enjoyed the video. Concise and crisp. Yet, it would probably be more useful to practitioners if the interview dug a little deeper into the answers. For example, “What are some of the challenges facing testers?” has a good answer in “It’s all about the team.” I agree. Good answer.
But IMHO that isn’t very useful. How does EA build good teams? What is the structure? Is QA integrated or are they adjunct to the software development team? What characteristics are key for successful hiring?
I realize that it is almost impossible to cover much ground in a 150 seconds of interview. So, I’m not poking fun or minimizing the effort or quality of Jane’s responses. My point is that I prefer to get just a little closer to rubber meeting the road so there is some take away that is actionable.
Did you see the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday? Bruce Springsteen always puts on a great show, and I heard several people say that was probably the best ever. I especially liked Glory Days. Reminds me of the great time I had with my college friends camping out for 5 days during finals week to get 2nd row tickets. Yeah, 5 days and we weren’t the first ones in line!
Speaking of glory days…
Back in 1981, I had my first computer science course in high school. It was my senior year, and somehow I convinced the teacher and administrators to let me take an independent study. That allowed me to be in the computer lab for 1.5 hours per day. The regular class only got an hour touching the computer per week. We had 3 Commodore Pet computers. Cool stuff.
Well, the Pets are only germane because a friend and I were writing games. We built a clunky version of Space Invaders using BASIC 1.0, peek() and poke(), 4kb of RAM, 40×25 monochrome monitor, and a tape recorder for persistent storage. Ahhh, the good old days.
But testing was rather easy. You didn’t even need to compile. Either the gun fired and the target disappeared or we had a bug. Very simple.
Sorry of the nostalgia! Hearing Jane talking about game usability as her top testing issue made me reminisce. Those were my only gaming days as a coder. After that, it was Fortran, Pascal, COBOL, Assembler, Octal machine code, ASP, XML, C++, and Ruby. Not a darn bit of it to produce something “fun”.
Maybe I should have stuck with Space Invaders. I could have been a game mogul. Ahhh, perhaps load testing geek is better.