Ray Warner · QA Pillar Manager, Squadron 42

We have a name for people like Phil and I: QA lifers. You get people who enter QA through several different means. Some people pursue the games industry, some people want to play games. This idea that it's just playing games, this is what pulls a lot of people into QA. But there's a specific skill set that comes really natural to a lot of QA testers, and it's the idea of problem solving and being interested in those problems and finding those solutions. And it's a real passion for that that drives people to continue a career in QA rather than chasing development. One of my favorite aspects, don't get me wrong, is seeing the development of people's careers as they come into QA, and whether they go up in QA or whether they go up in development or production, it's all amazing to watch people grow and gain knowledge of the product. But you get some people who are just wired to find the problem and make that problem worse and then tell people why it's so broken and then get that fixed. It was a particular passion that I found when I moved into QA, and then obviously as I got better and honed that skill in the 10 years that I was at Sony prior to coming to CIG, it became less about how I can branch out and become part of the creative force that make games, do the art or do the programming, and more about becoming someone who gets to see everything. Because that's what you get to see in QA. You are one of the few departments who see literally everything that gets put into a game. And it's such a rare thing to see in the games industry that I just fell in love with it, and ever since, it's amazing. I love it.

Phil Webster · QA Pillar Manager, Persistent Universe

The career pathing we have from QA touches everywhere. It can go into any aspect of game development or game production, or staying in QA and leadership and management and looking after people and project management. You've got a finger in every pie, and through that you develop a lot of relationships with all the departments, and you build those relationships, so you know all the different departments there are and you get really good relationships with them, so then you are able to help them better. Because QA is a service, right? It's a service for the entire company. And we have to provide the best service that we can. And we do that through building great relationships. And the best way to do that is have people come from us into their ranks, and they understand because they've been where we are. They know what information is great for us, what helps, what doesn't help. Riffing on that and going forward with that and pushing people forwards and keeping hold of people as well.

Ray Warner · QA Pillar Manager, Squadron 42

It's a really interesting aspect of it, having people move from QA to a production or a development process, because it can change the way that a department or a particular focus works, because they go in with so much understanding of what we're going to do to try and ruin their day at the end of it. We get these huge benefits of people saying, well, I understand how testing works now, I understand the process QA go through, I understand what they're trying to fix, I understand my feature, and this is a big one, my feature has an interaction point and affects other people's work. And that knowledge is something that's very, very rare to get when you come out of university and go into development and you're so siloed in the process that you're doing. So I love pushing QA into production. I love pushing QA into dev, but I do wish sometimes that I could keep them for myself.

Rodolfo · Global Director of QA

We do have guys from QA who have gone to all the areas. We have people who have gone to sound, people who have gone to art. Of course, a lot went to production. It's very, very common that they go to design, to game design, and the skills that they get from QA are very useful for that. But on top of that, we have people who actually code, and we have people who are doing automation, which includes coding and their relation with the code of the game. And these people develop skills that are super useful for development, but also for design. So it's more technical than what people think. It's a whole craft. And I always use an analogy, because this happens in the software industry a lot, that for some reason the QA work is not appreciated enough. The same way there's people who have a mindset that is very good for constructing, a constructive mindset, for QA you need to have a deconstructing mindset, and that is a skill in itself. It's very different, but it's very, very useful. And in other disciplines, it's not like this. For example, in physics, you have the Nobel Prize, right? And you give the Nobel Prize to people who are theoretical physicists, people who make theories, like Einstein. But you also give the Nobel Prize to people who are doing experimental physics, which is basically trying to prove if the theory this guy came up with is valid or not. And you need to make an experimental design of how to test that, how to test the theory of cosmology or quantum physics or whatever. That's exactly what we do. It's just we do it with software. So we're basically empiricists, experimental scientists working with software instead of working with physics or chemistry. That's what we're doing. And there's a lot of techniques behind it, a lot of knowledge and a process. It's not as simple as just playing the game. There's a way you have to approach it to do it in an efficient way, because you cannot find all the bugs in an infinite universe like we have just by trying to go through it. It will take you forever, so you need to do it in a certain way.