Warhammer Online is featuring QA lead Chris Bryant in this week's developer blog. In the article Bryant lets folks in on the secrets of squashing bugs. Check it out!
Hey there, everyone! My name is Chris Bryant (or as most of the staff in QA calls me, Old Man Bryant) and I am the Senior Lead for the Quality Assurance (QA) department here at Mythic. I have been with Mythic going on 6+ years now and I have spent the majority of that time working QA on either Dark Age or WAR. So, if there is a feature that you love (or hate) within either of those games I was probably involved in the testing of said feature at some point. But being in QA, I live by the following motto:
I don't make it, I don't break it, and I don't fix it. I just get to tell other people their stuff is broken.
It is really rare that you find a job that you love; one where you don't wake up in the morning and want to call in sick "just because." For me, this is one of them. I have actually had, on more than one occasion, my boss come up to me to yell at me to take time off because I can no longer accrue any more paid time off. And trust me, I really love my free time, but coming to work is fun almost every day. When you come to work and still have a great time, why miss a day?
When the Community guys asked me to write up a Dev Diary on the Day in the Life of the QA team, all I could think of was, "This is going to be really short." How much space would I need to write, "We test stuff"? Seriously.
If you have seen Grandma's Boy then you pretty much have a clue (albeit a very oversimplified one) about what we do here on a daily basis. But unlike the movie, or even other QA departments throughout the industry, we don't grind out game after game. We have a focused QA staff here, some that have been on the WAR project since the first art zone was uploaded onto a server. Having dedicated testers on one project for that amount of time is pretty unique in the industry.
There's a whole lot more to read so head to the link above and know all there is to know about pest control!
