Is there a lot of specialization in the QA department, in the sense that there are one or two people who are the ship testers and others who prefer to do weapons or server testing? Since you're a lead, do you put people on specific projects, or can they get their own voice into that as well?asked by Whitesnake

Well, pretty much everybody touches everything, but we're really big proponents of a specialist system where you find a niche, something that you like. Like, I came to this company for spaceships. I was five years old, dreamed of flying an X-Wing, and so I was like, this is what I wanted to do, I wanted to work with the spaceships. So that's kind of what became my focus when I first started here. Other people have different interests, the first-person shooter aspect. So it's like, "Oh, hey, you really like FPSs? Well, you can become one of our Star Marine guys." Other people have expertise when it comes to server creation, monitoring bandwidth and all that other type of stuff, helping with the netcode. So we really encourage testers to find something that they like, something that they're interested in working with, and the developers that they have fun working with, and take it and run with it. Right now I'm working primarily on Item 2.0, which is really cool because I get to bother Mark Abent and collect his tears, as we like to say in QA, whenever his code doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to. But yeah, it's a lot of fun, and we definitely encourage specialization. So there are people who are focusing on Squadron 42, some people on Star Marine, other people on ship combat, other people on the persistent universe. And it works out really well, because that way you have an authority in every single studio who not only the QA team knows to go to, but the devs do too. So if a dev gets a Squadron 42 bug and they haven't been through what's going on, they're going to need a little help with how to get to the area where they need to reproduce the bug.