Test Management Featured Article

In the last few years, I’ve worked hard on avoiding last-minute work pushes.

Historically, last-minute, all-night work marathons have been a norm in my life because I am engaged with a number of projects and there’s always a push at the end to get things complete.

Lately I’ve been recognizing that the key to avoiding some of the most stressful work marathons is better planning and project structuring. These marathons are less intense when I check back regularly on my overall goals and adjust as I go along so I am always working on the most important tasks and not just any old task on the project’s to-do list. I’ve also adopted an agile development model where I’m performing small but constant iterative development cycles instead of one long project push that finishes everything at the end.

Many game developers could learn from these adjustments of mine, too, at least according to a recent blog post by software testing management firm Zephyr. The company says that workloads are getting increasingly hard for quality assurance teams that are working on mobile gaming.

“The need to balance speed with quality has resulted in some unsavory working conditions for many mobile game testers,” noted the Zephyr blog. “Testers noted that the worst periods typically came toward the end of a project when QA efforts needed to be accelerated to meet rapidly approaching deadlines.”

The blog noted that pushing testing to the end of a release cycle is a recipe for disaster.

“By shoehorning an entire development cycle’s worth of testing into the final moments of production, it will inevitably result in a flawed release,” it added. “If these conditions are allowed to continue, mobile game developers run the risk of releasing a buggy and unresponsive product to a very savvy audience.”

If mobile game developers instead adopt an agile approach, with testing along the way and a generous feedback loop through good test management practices, the final quality assurance push is less about making sure the product works and more about little final adjustments.

This can result in having less big problems appear at the end and possibly having to be overlooked, and it can dramatically cut down on tester burnout and the last-minute crisis that often occurs with any big project and with mobile gaming projects in particular.

The company also suggested that while it is good to support many platforms, game development companies might need to restrict the range of devices they support out of necessity.

“Given the vast and sundry options in the mobile market, it’s unrealistic, time-consuming and costly to attempt to make games compatible with a majority of them,” the Zephyr blog noted.

We can work hard or we can work smart. I prefer to work smart, and it sounds like mobile game developers need to choose the same if they are to compete in the increasingly crowded mobile gaming market.