What does a QA team do?

Didnt come here to pile on. Others are covering the grievances. But what does a QA team normally do? It feels like some of this stuff should have been caught. Or am i misunderstanding what a QA team is supposed to do?

13 Likes

They pay to play the game.

27 Likes

qa = quality assurance

I think they just ensure the product is up to standard acceptable quality before it ships

1 Like

They don’t test it, they….

26 Likes

Sure ok, so how does something like 11.1.5 go live? Are there bigger issues they solved?

2 Likes

You are the QA team.

23 Likes

im not sure tbh… its prob like everything else. there are levels ya know. lol who knows

The company laid off QA workers some time ago so I wonder if any are left.

7 Likes

Speaking from experience, they are often the first to go when layoffs happen.

5 Likes

try to ensure a quality product? In WoW especially they’re just in triage mode, trying to find/fix the biggest issues.

That said, they’ve missed so many blatant high level bugs lately you wonder if they even have qa anymore. I’d guess they just run whatever they can via unit/automation and call it good these days, at least outside of the release possibly, and even then it seems like they’re more likely to just use players to beta everything.

3 Likes

I don’t know for certain, but my assumption is that QA plays the game rigorously and makes sure that the game is stable.

Blizzard, however, has been downsizing its QA team for years now, and likely outsourcing this work.

In reality, business isn’t about providing the best service or product. It is about providing the barest quality product or service that people are willing to bear and still pay for.

5 Likes

They banned their best QA testers, RAoV.

8 Likes

I saw QA was one of the least affected by layoffs. I think it’s just the cadence of release + quality of dev team.

Get laid off so the bean counters can report “growth” in quarterly earnings calls.

14 Likes

I do think also in the past they had a more robust beta participation, which helped with bugs naturally. They probably still have a barren QA team as well.

By the recent Microsoft ones or overall? Because there have been a few big ones.

I haven’t looked into it, I just see people say “actually QA wasn’t gutted” whenever someone says they fired too many people, especially in QA. Maybe it’s cap.

don’t people get into ptr easily? you’re all are the testers that blizzard doesn’t listen to lol they’ll assure you they won’t listen!
:cherries:

1 Like

I’m willing to bet that the Blizzard QA team doesn’t really play World of Wacraft and probably tries to capture more conventional bugs like…do my abilities cast, can I walk through the world, can I sign in, etc.

Because there’s no way a QA team that actually plays the game would let the abomination that the Cooldown Manager is, go public. Or allow the Personal Resource Display to be deleted.

Blizzard needs to start hiring AddOn developers and I dunno, probably paying a group of world first raiders or something, to play the game. They would capture probably all the bugs and bad UI elements

4 Likes

Be reasonable. Somebody had to be sacrificed on the altar of corporate bonuses. You can’t seriously expect management, who contribute literally nothing to the games quality, to take a pay cut now can you?

10 Likes