Game Testing: All in One [Paperback]

Traditional program testing has come a long way in 50 years but the complexity, time constraints and variety of situations facing game testers is at the edge of the software testing world.

The authors combine authentic experience with Computer Games and Game Testing in a logical, pragmatic and interesting way. They long ago reasoned that it is very costly (if not sometimes impossible) to test all possible paths through a game's options and through the application of some insightful statistical approaches present ways to reduce the total number of tests required under certain assumptions. To me this one insight was worth the cost of the book.

Beyond this outstanding statistical testing insight for the workers in the field, the expository material that covers Games is exceptionally good for the individual trying to put the whole field in perspective. In Part I they address "Being a Game Tester" (with a side venture later in the book to identify different game testing personalities) followed by a good discussion of "Why Testing is Important". Part II talks about the "Making of a Game" while Part III introduces the concepts and vocabulary of Testing. In Part IV the authors bring in the concept of Combinatorial Testing ( another statistical approach) and present it in a step by step way so that the tester can perform the testing suite without knowing all of the theory behind that approach. "Test Flow Diagrams", "Cleanroom Testing" and "Test Trees" adds very modern disciplined techniques to the testing tool process that will prove of value. Part V discusses some advanced testing ideas all of which are very practical in the fast evolving world of Games.

The authors seem to have been brought together and inspired to write just at the time when the field realizes that loosely structured ad-hoc testing may be costing more than the field can afford.

There's no shortage of books on the sexy aspects of game development - design, art, programming, business - but hardly any on testing, which is an integral part of a game project. Keep in mind, it's much more likely for a company to have a full-time testing staff all the way through the project than audio designers or writers. So you might find this long and comprehensive text a bit dry, but it is important. It explains the importance of testing, explains various methodical techniques to provide test coverage and makes the subject a bit more interesting by citing examples of real games. I thought I pretty much knew everything about this subject, but I did learn one thing that now seems obviously useful - having separate priority and severity labels for each bug report in a bug database (a peeve of mine is that severities are often altered or bugs even in accurately marked closed to make the numbers look good - "juking the stats" as they say in The Wire). If I had to list some areas of improvement, I'd say the initial definition of regression testing didn't sound quite right to me and it's still not clear to me how to implement proper regression testing. And as a programmer, the explanations of coding bugs sound a bit weird to me (also, there's one additional bug category I could supply from personal experience - bugs that show up in release builds but not developer builds because there's "safer" compilation in the latter). But until there's some competition, this should be the standard reference.