Testing or Quality Assurance Engineering?

Special Guest post by Aaron Wilson, Quality Engineering Manager for Big Fish Games.



If you’ve been in software for a minute, you’ve seen teams ship bugs. Big, breaking, and even super obvious bugs sometimes go out the door risking your reputation and revenue. You’d be forgiven if you’re confused about how this could happen. I mean, look at all the folks who have touched the product in the last two weeks! And of course, all the testing. But maybe it wasn’t enough.

Now, here comes the big bad decision. More testing. And why not? Clearly there wasn’t enough testing. Maybe.

The trap is set, baited, and ready to grab us by the ankle.

Read More

Introducing GameBench Labs: Providing verified performance results to device makers and game studios

GameBench is rapidly growing in popularity as a mobile testing tool, which people can use for any purpose they like. It's great to see our software being used by phone enthusiasts like XDA for benchmarking, by game studios like Rovio for QA and by device makers like OnePlus for hardware optimisation. At the same time, we've also seen increased demand from our clients for us to offer GameBench as an end-to-end benchmarking service, in which we take charge of testing and publishing authoritative and credible results for their products. In response, after a year of experimenting with publishing ratings via our Reference Data Beta, we're pleased to announce the launch of GameBench Labs! Please read on for more...

Read More

Nintendo did at least one thing right when bringing Animal Crossing to mobile

It's fair to say that Nintendo's latest mobile title, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, has met with a mixed reception.

In the press, reviewers have expressed a number of complaints about the game, including its monetisation mechanics, intermittent server issues and lack of certain gameplay elements that were found in earlier console versions of Animal Crossing.

Read More

Learn how Rovio puts free-to-play quality at the heart of game development, keeping two billion users coming back for more

How did Angry Birds reach one billion users within three years of its launch, and two billion users just 18 months later? And how is Rovio’s skill in creating free-to-play mobile games still driving the company’s success today?

Most answers to these questions have something in common: recognition for the sheer feeling of quality that the Angry Birds games exude in everything from their touch-responsiveness to their physics simulation and in-game economics. But this poses an additional question: how does Rovio achieve such quality?

Read More

Use game technology to ensure the visual smoothness of your app

The notion of frame rate, or frames per second (fps), which measures the smoothness of an animation, is traditionally associated with game development rather than app development. This is because games depend on stutter-free graphics in order to feel immersive, believable and responsive to a gamer’s touch inputs.

However, as businesses increasingly rely on visual fluidity to sell their products and transmit the quality of their brands, this distinction between the two sides of our industry is becoming obsolete.

Streaming video, displaying moving ads, scrolling through media-rich pages, swiping across screens, zooming and dragging -- at a fundamental level these are all animations that feel wrong if they’re not smooth. And frame rate is pretty much the the only objective way to measure this smoothness as a user perceives it on their screen.

Read More