Quote Originally Posted by zerathule
By the way, what kind of testing processes to you use in developpement ?
I mean of course besides the unitary testing ever developper does.
Do you have automated testing processes ? Do you use testing tools ?
Re reading your post, it seems to imply developpers are also responsible for testing, dont you have specific testing and more important qualification teams ?

(An interested (not game)software developper)
Sorry Zerathule, I can't go in to in depth description of our processes. I might breach an NDA.
But ...Every developer (programmer, designer or artist) has to test any work they implement in game and ensure that it doesn’t cause immediately noticeable issues/bugs. While we are at it we will let others know about any bugs we notice elsewhere in the game. That obviously doesn’t catch every bug or possible breakage that may be present or possible.
On a regular basis a build of the game then gets passed to a dedicated group of game testers who check for basic stability (A lot of testing is manual but soak tests, tests for simple crash bugs and performance issues are automated.) The build then goes on to the much larger QA dept. for a thorough going over. (Again testing is a mixture of automated and manual.) All identified issues are then passed back for action. This procedure is repeated many times during the dev process, with much more intensity as we approach release of the game.

Again even this process doesn't catch every single problem that might possibly occur. There just simply isn't the manpower and time to give the game the kind of thrashing it gets out in the wild world of customer game play.
If you think that many hundreds of thousands of people (in the UK alone) get to play the game, many for more than 30-40 hours of gameplay time, in just the first few months after release. That's a lot of stress testing.
That's compared to perhaps 150 people at CA and Sega who are in some way involved in the development of the game. You now see how something you guys might find some time after release can get missed?

If we could apply unrestricted resources to testing, we would, but there really isn't the resource available if we want to get the game out in a reasonable amount of time for a reasonable cost to the customer. It's not an ideal world unfortunately. Obviously we do try our best to fix (via patches) post release bugs.

Hope this is enough info for you?