How to Become a Competent QA: Insights and Practices from Game Testing

The author, a QA professional with over thirteen years of experience in game testing, explains the difference between QA (Quality Assurance) and QC (Quality Control) and emphasizes that modern QA work often encompasses QC responsibilities, requiring a broader skill set.

Becoming a qualified QA involves more than just basic testing; it requires continuous thinking, strong analytical abilities, and a commitment to learning, as many newcomers enter the field with misconceptions about its difficulty and relevance.

Key competencies include thorough demand analysis—examining design documents for unclear, unreasonable, or erroneous specifications—and asking critical questions to uncover hidden issues before testing begins.

Writing comprehensive test cases is essential; detailed test suites act like a net that catches defects across all equivalence classes and boundary conditions, improving test efficiency and product quality.

Test‑left shift practices involve early testing activities such as reviewing design documents, preparing GM commands, and collaborating with automation QA to perform white‑box analysis, thereby catching problems before code integration.

Bug analysis should follow the 5‑Why technique to trace root causes, avoid blame‑shifting, and focus on controllable factors, turning each defect into a learning opportunity.

Test‑right shift activities include post‑release monitoring, log analysis, user feedback collection, and continuous improvement of test cases and automation scripts.

The article also describes a custom tool developed by the team—a weekly costume‑asset checker for the game engine—that automates detection of broken assets, reducing manual effort and preventing production issues.

Finally, the author advocates regular retrospectives and knowledge sharing, proposing a personal “pyramid principle” that stresses building a solid foundation of basic QA skills before aspiring to higher technical or managerial goals.