Video Game Software Testing, Agile Theory And Practice

This paper tries to find the goal of game software testing first, i.e. to timely find software bugs and bad game designs that will have bad effect on players' gaming experience. Then, it focuses on the analysis of why the philosophy of Agile development can be applied to game testing, and on the principles and practices of game testing armed with Agile philosophy. Agile Philosophy is a software development methodology, which took shape at the end of 1990s. It has several genres, among which, XP(eXtreme Programming) is the mainstream. XP has 4 values to express its idea of software development, i.e. Communication, Feedback, Courage, and Simplicity. It has also a series of practices, which are proven effective methods, to implement its values. Agile theory and practices expresses its true value by always focusing on providing real value to its customers with light-weighted engineering; since it advocates simplicity, refactorying and feedback. Agile methodology is not only very widely used and proved very successful in the field of software development, but also attracts attention and gets applied among other fields.Generally speaking, the requirement of game software is very unclear, which, in turn, will result in the change of contents of game testing. From this point of view, Agile methodology is suitable for game testing. Moreover, game testing is always required to finish with high quality and within a short period of time, which finds its match in Agile methodology, i.e. Agile methodology has values of "simplicity" and "feedback", principle of "high quality", and practice of "short cycle" to help game testing to fulfill its requirement. The author of the paper had long time experience of game testing management. After reading many books and articles on Agile development, and having tried Agile practices in software development, this author found that flexibility, openness, and the courage and method of trying to tackle complexity are the best Agile values or principles for game testing to learn. This author tried to combine Agile methodology and game testing practice, which results in the invention of the concept of Agile Game Testing, and the correspondent principles and practices. This author has applied the practices of Agile Game Testing to a trialproject, which proved to be a success. Agile Game Testing has its principle of Quantification, Courage, Calmness, and Concentration. It emphasizes firstly that game testing should not be unorderly, but controllable and measurable, which forms the basis of any engineering methodology and practices. The commonly used metrics of Agile Game Testing includes: priority of test cases, grades of bugs, priority of test items, test coverage, test efficiency rate and test time for test case, etc. With the data of all this metrics, the testing team is very clear about the situation of testing as well as the quality level of the game software; therefore, it can control the game testing in the right direction and provide the development team with valuable information and suggestions. To be Agile Game Testing, it's necessary to have light-weighted tools, i.e. bug database and automated testing software. The former is indispensable for any engineering methodology, while the latter is very important to ensure high efficiency and quality for Agile Game Testing. Agile Game Testing puts forwards a set of practices, including simple but complete testing checklist, detailed test plan, cross testing, testing coordination, complementary testing and exploratory testing. Like Agile methodology, the practices of Agile Game Testing are open. They should be tailored to be used for different game software projects and different company cultures. Almost none of the Agile Game Testing practices are inventions, but to use all of them together is an invention. Furthermore, as Agile methodology claimed: if you know it's right, you must do it no matter how simple it is, and you must do it extremely.