QA Company Archives - iXie Gaming

Game Testing: Partnering for Quality

iXie Gaming — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 11:36:26 +0000

Reliability, quality assurance at competitive costs make iXie the ideal testing partner for this video games publisher.

CLIENT PROFILE
A leading global firm based in the US was developing a software tool for workforce management, employee attendance marking, collecting labour data and generating attendance summary of a large workforce. The software was developed using .NET technologies and AJAX and Oracle 10G was the database used.
The client was scouting around for the right testing partner, one who had the capability to manage the testing process at rapid speed, without sacrificing quality. Importantly, the QA team at the client site wanted a 100% automation-driven testing process, to reduce time-to-release, for every build. Also, the project needed handling of multiple data sets for a highly data intensive application.

KNOWLEDGE CHALLENGES
The client had attempted to create an in-house testing team but faced certain hurdles:

Games need to be tested on the right devices for accurate quality assurance. For this, the client needed to invest in the devices, which would become redundant after the game was released.
The second challenge was to hire key, experienced QA personnel, which added to the costs.
Assets also add to overhead costs, an additional drain on the finances of the publishing company.
In-house testing would dilute the focus of the company from publishing to managing the testing assets.

The ideal solution was to look for a testing partner with its own asset base to outsource quality assurance too.

ADVANTAGE iXie
Some of the qualities the publisher for including:

The asset base
The experience level
Cost competitiveness

iXie’s game testing proved to be the right fit for the client because of our experience in testing across devices.
We were able to perform testing on:

Our testing lab houses mobile devices and Tablets of all kinds – Android, iOS, Windows and Amazon Kindle
We also have gaming PCs & Laptops to support game titles
We have experienced personnel, averaging 12 years of experience in game testing.

BENEFITS OF USING iSAFE
One of iXie’s key and standard approaches to testing is to work closely with the client’s third party developers in planning and executing the project, interacting with them in real time. Our key ingredients for testing success are:

PLANNING
Our work was mapped out to include testing for:

Functionality
Compatibility
Compliance
Regressions
Smoke
Test case preparation

INVESTMENT
After understanding the requirements for the testing, we invested in:

Purchase of mobile devices
Purchase of high-end PCs
Network (exclusive leased line, backup network lines)
Firewall
Hiring of full-time resources

IMPLEMENTATION

Execution – we worked closely with the client right from the alpha stage of the project, then beta, close master, soft launch, global launch and maintenance, updates and patches
Shared daily status report
Shared Weekly status report
Tracked a milestone checklist
Maintained an iOS compliance and compatibility checklist

COMMUNICATION
We maintained communication with the client, thus retaining their trust and updating them of progress periodically through multiple tiers:

Chat based – Skype, Slack
Audio conferencing bridges
Video conferencing bridges
Email communication
Bug database (JIRA/Mantis)

These four steps ensure that the game to be tested is understood well, the test cases prepared, each level tested methodically and the client provided with the right information critical to the success of the game.
BENEFITS OF iXie GAME TESTING
We at iXie go the extra mile to make sure the projects we undertake are delivered successfully, on time, every time. To ensure this, we equipped ourselves suitably:

Rapid scalability of resources – our team was beefed up from 8 to 80 in two months. This helped us complete the project on time.
Infrastructure: We spruced up our infrastructure to suit the needs of the project, thus covering every aspect of testing.
Effective Communication: Continuous interaction with the customers and their third-party developers helped us gain their confidence and test in real time.
Suggestions and Improvements: Based on our vast experience in game testing, we made suggestions to the customer on game design and monetization. This not only got positive feedback, but the suggestions were implemented and enhanced the quality.

TOOLS

Defect Management Tool – JIRA

METRICS

15,000 test cases were developed

KEY PROJECT STATISTICS

Team size: 80
Duration: 7 + months

Accolades –
I can’t say enough about how great this team has been.
We have had a launch on 4 platforms – first geo-locked, and then world-wide.
The team has been very adaptive to last minute overtime requests, and have done so cheerfully.
They have been integral to a very successful launch (we are number #3 in Apple store worldwide).
We also have a 5 star rating in the Apple store.
In other words – this team is excellent.
There is nothing they need to improve right now.

-QA Manager of a billion dollar gaming firm in the US

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Pokemon Go wins the race! How? Why not Sony and Microsoft?

iXie Gaming — Fri, 19 May 2017 11:21:59 +0000

On July 6, a Virtual Blizzard hit globally and of course, a new sensation that smashed all the mobile gaming download records is none other than Pokemon Go. A word became viral and everyone playing the game with a new idea- Augmented reality (AR) trending in the daylights hours of the summer season. Pokemon; the talk of the town, the game of the year to phrase a few is definitely a new flavor among all gaming apps. Within 13 hours the game reaches the highest grossing app chart (App store and Google playstore) in US crossing over 15 million download within a week and daily users for this app is more than Facebook and Twitter, statistics says. This success of Pokemon accelerates the Niantic to implement the new technology in gaming which will take the game to next level.
Behind the scenes of Pokemon Go – An untold 20 years of Voyage
There is no such terminology called as instant success, even Edison had 1000+ unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. The same applied to John Hanke as well, the creator of Pokémon Go.
It’s all started in 1996 when John Co came up with multiplayer online game “Meridian 59” and he moved on to his next step of mapping the world. He launched “Keyhole” linking maps with aerial photography, and ended up on the very first, 3D aerial map linking GPS of the world via online. This so-called Keyhole was bought by Google and finally turned up as “Google Earth”. For four years (2004-2010) John headed Google GEO team focusing mainly on online games based on GPS and also created Google maps and Google street view. In 2010, John launched Niantic Lab funded by Google to create GPS-based games and in 2012 “Ingress” first GEO based game created by John at Niantic. John’s idea of Pokemon real game came into action when Google and Pokemon company teams up for April fool’s day joke, which allowed the end users to find the Pokemon creatures on Google maps. He planned to build Pokémon Go and raises $25M from Google, Nintendo, the Pokémon Company and other investors between Dec 2015 to Feb 2016 to grow a team of 40+ to release Pokémon Go on the same year. The big day finally came for John on July’ 16 where the game went viral and Nintendo’s share was raised to $12Billion and $2Million on app purchase on the same day creating a history.
Finally a Financial Breakthrough:

Pokémon Go is a huge hit capturing not only the people minds but so called a commercial revolution. The monster game is owned by both Niantic Labs and The Pokemon company, yet Nintendo who owns 32 percent of shares doubled their profit margin between $US 20Billion and $42 billion, source says. And now, Nintendo’s shares is flying high having a net worth more than Sony and retaining #1 in revenue grossing charts @ U.S. would add up to 15 percent to their net profits and #5 ranking in Japan profiting by up to 10 percent.

Statistics Overview:

The Pokemon go daily usage time as on 8th July was 33 minutes and 20 Seconds, which is more than average day users on Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Active users per day were estimated as 19 million (as on July 8) which enormously raised up to 45 million as on Aug’ 16 and it crashed all the records made by candy crush soda saga and Clash Royale. Yet the sad news is it was not released on Pokemon’s home country- Japan due to some issues. But Nintendo and Niantic were in full swing to release soon.

Sony and Microsoft- Strategy went wrong??
Of course, PS4 and Xbox were ruling the gaming arena since 2011 in sales and profit thereby taking the shares away from Nintendo where their sales units were down to 11.6 million. This made the two legends to invest more and more in console gaming industry, nevertheless, the PC games were not reached everyone in recent years. They didn’t analyze the recent market trends on gaming since the focus is extremely moved on to Mobile gaming rather than PCs. These Gladiators realized the real trendsetter when Candy crush launched smashing all records in terms of revenue and acknowledged the power of mobile apps.
And now Nintendo done a Reverse engineering and moved one step ahead, i.e. instead of playing the game between man to mobile, they came out with the game plan of bringing people together with elements comprising social media. That’s how they launched Pokemon Go. Just like the Facebook, they came up with a financial idea, “FREE APP” and that made the game most successful ever in the Gaming industry. Nintendo gave the people not only the game but also the trending technology “Augmented Reality” and now it became a user-friendly tech. This is the real achievement than Billion dollars.

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