Bugsmashing open development vs closed development pros and cons.asked by Ripking

Favorite pro/con... most hated con, go. So, we should talk about this for a little bit in that, there's a big difference in the team set up when you're live and basically open development compared to when you're behind closed doors and the players don't get a chance to see what you're actually working on. Cause like, I remember when I was a designer working for the studios and when we... before we released any betas or alphas or anything like we were able to just work on our feature and really nail that feature down. We also had... you know QA didn't really bug it up, because they knew it was being worked on. Where now in open development we're always live and people get to see everything we do every single push...

Oh yeah. [nods]

And the features we push forward. The QAs ... again QA is awesome, because they're basically our last line of defense as well as they're on all the bugs on live, they're on the bugs on the features, so they're bugging everything.

And they even talk with the community to find what they have ...

Basically.

And going back and forward...

Yeah.

Gather all the information and drop it on our desk. Okay. [laughs]

Yeah, so it's like it's,I think open development to me takes a little bit longer. I think that's the con, but again we get really valuable feedback really early on. I know port modification and the 2.4 stuff we've been working with the private group. We've been getting a lot of feedback on some of the features that we're trying to push out and stuff we didn't even think about we're like, "Oh yeah."

Yeah.

Okay, cool. We didn't catch that. Cause, I mean QA we have like maybe 30 people if that. I don't even know the actual number.

I think there is more, cause UK and Austin have a lot.

Yeah, but it's like I don't know. Like, I think it might be about like 30 something people and that's not enough people like all the stuff we need from there. We need more. We need more people test.

Need big development access.

So that's good. That's definitely a good pro for having open development in that where in closed development we don't have those same numbers of people being able to jump in and play test. Sometimes getting everyone involved is kind of crazy, especially in trying to get devs to take time out of the day to playtest. Which we do, from...

Well, that's why you go around going, [pokes Randy in his shoulder repetitively] "Ready to playtest?"

Yeah.

"Ready to playtest? Ready to playtest?"

Yeah, little bit.

"5 minutes. 5 minutes" [holds up 5 fingers repetitively][Both Laugh]

So yeah, that's kind of problem I have for like open development versus closed development. I don't have a preference. Sometimes I have, like if I'm working on a feature, I have a preference, but if I'm not working on a feature and I'm just like helping support stuff then I definitely prefer one to the other.

Yeah.

Anything on you?

Nah, I'm good.