Several Companies Have Laid Off QA Staff Lately

Considering the number of bugs in their previous releases and patches, should we now presume that they did not want EVE to be lonely as the only MMO company with a patch that has deleted system files?

: Zubon

4 thoughts on “Several Companies Have Laid Off QA Staff Lately”

  1. As a tester, I know this tends to be the place that gets hit in a development shop. Too many people high up don’t really know how things work or expect that developers can test too.

    They can, some do, but most have no experience in testing or suffer from bias based on the requirements presented to them. They’re stuck thinking about how it should work and not what can be done with it. And it gets even harder the larger the project is.

    There is a lot more to testing than simply making sure it does what it is supposed to. Too many people don’t get that.

  2. Being a software developer I agree with Smaken completely. Developers do basic testing to verify that it does what it is supposed to do, but it takes someone else to make sure that it doesn’t do anything unintended. There’s a reason writers don’t edit their own work.

    My condolences to all of the QA staff recently laid off, and my thanks to both them and those who still do testing.

  3. Not defending the practice, but there are other reasons.

    *Some of these studios just went through consolidation / buyouts. They’re bound to have some overlapping departments… and some large publishers believe that the QA staff should be independent of the studio they support. When you work TOO closely to the devs, you often know/see things more as a developer and less like an end-user. This can theoretically mar the user experience testing (similar to a writer reviewing his own work).

    *Some of these studios may have gone through title cancellations or delays that make supporting an entire production line tougher. This often hits production FIRST because the individuals are often undervalued and the QA skills are seen as a small subset of developer skills. You may see your database coder as valuable enough to retain even if there’s no current database work, but you might see that tester as easily replacable (heck, maybe the underworked database coder can do it till things pick up!) Yes, there are flaws to this thinking, but I see way too much of it.

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