Exploring Quality Assurance Practices and Tools for Indie Games

The games industry is growing worldwide, even eclipsing the global film industry as a premier entertainment solution. Developing a commercial game is a complex, lengthy, and costly process. Therefore, quality assurance (QA) is critical for producing high-quality games that are fun and reasonably defect-free. Prior studies have explored game development methodologies and testing approaches, goals, and automation. However, they have not addressed the disparate contexts of independent (indie) and non-indie game development with respect to available funding and resources. Since indie games make up the lion's share of newly released games each year, we want to empower their developers by maximizing their QA opportunities within their resource constraints. To lay the foundation for such support, we surveyed 19 game developers who have experience with commercially released games to learn about their QA experiences and perspectives based on 22 of their released game projects. Our survey results show that indies have less clear goals and plans for testing, perform tests on a conditional basis over a regular testing schedule, and have subjective test results.