HELP with QA Tester interview!

[AcuraSpeed]

Hi, some of you may know this already from previous threads, but I have an interview this week at a big development company for a QA job. I recently received some information from a tester who works there regarding the interview process. Well, it's a lot more hands-on than I would have thought. They are going to have me play a buggy version of a game, and then write down problems, and how they might be fixed or improved. I guess this is to test my communication skills and ability at testing games. I'm fairly confident that I will notice bugs when I see them, as I have been playing games since I was 4 (I am now 22). Despite my vast gaming experience, I have never tested games before or played an incomplete/buggy title. I am wondering if anyone could please tell me what to look out for. Like maybe some common bugs, or things I should notice. Any examples or general advice would be immensely appriciated. Please write ASAP, as my interview is on Wednesday.

[yaustar]

You are right, the idea is for them to find out how good you at communicating bugs to the development team. As well as noticing bugs, you will also have to note down the how to reproduce the bug in as few steps as possible.

The worst types of bug report are ones that don't have reproduction steps or have reproduction steps that don't cause the bug to happen.

TEST the game
OBSERVE for bugs and glitches
CONFIRM that it can be reproduced
RECORD the steps to create the bug or glitch

As for what to look for, anything that shouldn't be in normal game flow or part of the game design. That is as specific as it gets without knowing the game or technology behind it.

Read:
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson5.htm
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson17.htm
http://www.igda.org/Forums/showthrea...threadid=30441
http://igda.org/Forums/showthread.php?threadid=30396

[jillduffy]

I once heard Laura Fryer (Microsoft) talk about interviewing game testers. She said a question she liked to ask in the interview is, "If you were tasked with trying to break a Coke vending machine, what would you do?"

I guess that's something to mull over at the very least! I think the question is really asking, "What kinds of things can you do 'wrong' within the normal parameters of use to test the machine's ability to respond to you using it incorrectly?"

[Claxon]

Do you know the type of game you would be testing? If you do, we'll be able to suggest more specific things, but otherwise keep an eye out for anything that looks delicate (anything involving physics can usually be broken quite spectacularly). Also keep an eye out for text overlapping, spelling and gramatical errors. Also be sure to try to grade the bug (and level of repeatability) correctly. If the game crashes / you cannot continue: Class A bug, if it's pretty bad / very obvious but you can continue to play past it: Class B, less obvious: Class C and so on. Same with repeatability, you're usually say this in a percentage, but as a programmer it's infuriating to find a bug marked as 100% repeatable because it happened only once, and the tester didn't bother checking it.

Of course make sure you use well constructed sentences, and include details. Things to note would be, what you did to cause the bug, what happened when the bug occured, what you felt should happen, any information that could be relevant. No sarcasm (that can wait until after they've hired you )