By: Amanda 'Brynhildr' Cosmos, Quality Assurance Team

“So I used to joke around with Sapience, saying “We should totally do a QA Dev Diary!” He would laugh, and I would laugh, and that was the end of it. Then, months later, he took me up on it…”

And now for something completely different

Actually, Sapience first went to my boss, who then approached me about writing a QA (Quality Assurance team) dev diary for Book 3, Volume I. My boss and I discussed it together and came to a conclusion: this is really hard! Our job isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, contrary to popular opinion. We each tried writing about QA structure and process, to get everyone acquainted with how we do things, but reading it was so incredibly dull that we scrapped it. QA doesn’t “play” LOTRO all day; it’s more like bending the game to our will. We fly around Middle-earth like some kind of techno-Valar, hunting down the bug-servants of Melkor before the player-Children of Iluvatar awaken.

On second thought, I guess that does sound like playing. Well, we can’t just do whatever we want; there is proper procedure and documentation to follow. My team (we are called “Team Ramrod”) creates a lot of that documentation. We usually end up “playing” with spreadsheets more often than anything else. Team Ramrod writes up the test plans that the rest of the QA teams use to check all of the new content in the game. To get this done, we are assigned to work closely with designers on their specific deliverables (new features, updates, bug fixes, etc.) for upcoming releases. This allows us to know exactly how we should approach the testing phase before any of it is implemented, and it lets us know ahead of time how much testing bandwidth (fancy QA-speak for time) a certain deliverable will need. Team Ramrod’s members are like the lobbyists of QA; we represent the QA team’s interests within the development process. The designers get the final say, but they rely on us to bring forth problems before they go live and balloon into an unmanageable mess.