By Thereza Carlos, QA at Kokku
Many people outside the gaming industry may not know what a Functional Quality Assurance (QA) Analyst does to guarantee the quality of the product, many may think that this role means just sitting down and playing games all day. However, while we do spend a lot of time in the game, the reality is way more complex and a lot more critical to the success of any project. That’s why I am here to demystify this role and show why QA is an essential part for the game, the team and the development process as whole.
QA Segments
First of all, it’s important to notice that Quality Assurance can have a lot of ramifications internally, Functional QA is only one segment of the process inside a game development. For instance, at Kokku, we have three divisions that make sense for the QA process and work together to deliver high quality games. In summary, those branches are:
- Functional QA: primary goal is to validate the system’s features, capabilities, and interactions with different components. It involves testing the software’s input and output, data manipulation, user interactions and the system’s response to various scenarios and conditions.
- Art QA: checks 3D characters, 3D assets, 2D files, and textures to ensure its technical requirements are met. The art test process ensures that the asset delivers the expected performance, usability, and functionality.
- Dev QA: works closely with developers to ensure that the code is working as expected from the beginning. They are deeply involved in creating unit tests, continuous integration, performance, security, and other technical aspects to ensure that the code produced by developers is robust, scalable and free of major issues.
All above are equally important to guarantee the high standards necessary to our deliveries, but for this article we will focus on learning a little more about Functional Quality Assurance on games.
Functional QA
As the name suggests, Functional QA focuses on ensuring that the application functions as intended. But it doesn’t stop there, it’s also related to checking requirements and validating if the system meets what users and stakeholders’ expect. To achieve this, Functional QA runs a wide range of tests, including Unit, Integration, Functional, Smoke, Sanity, Regression, Exploratory, Performance, Compatibility and Accessibility Testing.
Clearly, this goes way beyond just “playing the game”. So, let’s dive a little deeper on other key responsibilities for Functional QA in games:
- Bug reporting: identify and document bugs in every aspect of the game, from mechanics and UI to audio, networking and crashes, using detailed steps so developers can reproduce and fix them.
- Gameplay validation: ensure mechanics behave as designed and the game is both functional and fun. Yes, fun is part of quality too!
- Collaboration with Dev and Design teams: work closely with developers and designers to provide feedback and clarify issues, helping refine features before release.
- Performance assurance: validate that the game runs smoothly on all supported platforms without major frame drops or crashes.
- Provide key gameplay feedback: identify areas where the gameplay experience can be improved, such as controls that feel unintuitive, mechanics that are unbalanced (too easy or too difficult) or moments that break immersion.
- Certification and Compliance: prepare the game to meet platform requirements (PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo), which is crucial for approval and release.
- Telemetry and Data validation: ensure in-game data tracking works correctly for analytics and player behavior insights.
- Accessibility checks: validate options like subtitles, colorblind modes, remapping, text size, contrast and difficulty assists.
This is just an overview of what a Functional Quality Assurance does during a game development, each one of these topics can be turned into an article of its own, having more and more ramifications. Next time you hear someone say QA is just about “playing games,” you’ll know the truth: it’s about making sure the game works, feels great and meets the high standards players expect.
