🐞 QA Stands For Quality p.3 - QAing Games or Software
Predictable Software, Unpredictable Games and How To Treat Them
Hey friends 👋
Welcome to the next issue of this QA series, where I share the information that helped me become a QA and that I picked up over the years to climb from a Trainee QA to managing an entire department, and that I used to teach as a course on how to become a QA from scratch.
Some time ago, we talked about what’s better in terms of career development for QA and what are the pros and cons with Software Testing and Game Testing. Today I wanted to dig a little deeper and talk about fundamental differences and similarities between these two branches of QA.
Alright, let’s get into it.
📋 The Predictable World of Traditional Software
Before you can recognise the beauty and chaos of game systems, you need to understand predictable systems. This should become your internal reference point for how software (all software) should behave, as games are also a type of software.
If we are talking about an e-commerce website or any kind of business application (from fitness trackers to a calculator), we are talking about stability most of the time. You have all your flows mapped out, very few edge cases and in general, a well-behaved system that rarely does anything unusual unless changes are introduced into it.
Testing an e-commerce checkout is rhythmic and orderly: add item → verify subtotal → apply discount → pay.
If something breaks, it’s usually a logic issue — a math error, a missing validation, a slow database call.
