You have to be a very specific type to make a career out of QA. None of your colleagues will like you and your job is to tear apart other peoples work.
On the contrary – when I was on a testing team we got on very well with the developers. It is possible to submit bug reports nicely (and really good developers like we had appreciate that the better we make the code before release, the better it is for everybody in the long run).
‘Proper’ QA staff will have a good understanding of business processes as well as the ability to find all the holes in code – so you stand a good chance of not having code with fewer bugs in it out the end of the development process but it may also actually do what the users need it to.
The only developers I’ve met who don’t like QA staff testing their code are the bad ones.
Aye, I love QA. The danger when you’re working on a project is that you get very blinkered, particularly if there’s deadline looming – you test what you’ve just done quickly, just to make sure that it works, then move onto the next thing. QA test your work in the context of the entire game – what happens if the player does something unexpected? Does it impact on any later gameplay actions?
