As games continue to increase in sophistication, they’re also growing in scale and complexity—making it ever more critical to have a high-functioning QA team in place.

Quality assurance (QA) plays an integral role in delivering a quality gaming experience that meets player expectations and overall satisfaction. However, building and managing a QA team that’s right for your game requires careful planning, collaboration, and a high level of organization.

The following shares insights on choosing a QA model that’s suitable for your needs and strategies for managing large-scale QA teams, ensuring your games meet the highest standards.

Choosing the model that's best for you

When building QA teams for large-scale testing, it’s important to have a clear understanding of your game’s requirements. These demands will vary depending on your game’s size, your target market, coverage requirements, and support budget.

At PTW, we typically build off three QA team models which can be customized based on our partners’ needs.

One studio, one shift

Example:

Our QA team at PTW Bangalore supports a client based in Europe with all of their QA needs. We started in 2010 with small teams working on small-time projects and gradually grew to a team of 170 full-time employees that provide continuous support on their titles. Today, the QA teams working on these projects have dedicated workspaces to ensure security measures are maintained.

This engagement works especially well because European and Indian shift timings overlap, which improves cooperation between QA, developers, and the production teams.

(If you want to learn more about why shift timings make a big difference, “The Power of In-Time Zone Solutions for Quality Assurance” covers this in more detail.)

One studio, multiple shifts

Example:

We have a few different clients working with this kind of engagement. They required extended support over different shifts to ensure full coverage of their games.

Each game studio has their own customized requirements based on their QA coverage needs. In one instance, the developers operated within US shift hours, expecting the core team to align with their shifts while other teams provided support during extended hours. With other studios, developers operated in multiple regions and required core teams for each product to work during different shifts.

Multiple studios

Example:

PTW works with a game studio that has several exceptionally popular games, and they needed to have a QA team in several different regions. Their QA support started in Bucharest and Shanghai and expanded to Montreal, Taipei, and Tokyo. Currently, the team is supporting six titles from five different studios with an overall team size of 148 people.

Once you’ve selected the optimal model for your quality assurance needs, the next step is designing strategies to optimize performance.

Management strategies for large QA teams

Regardless of the model you choose, implementing the right strategies is crucial for ensuring your teams are up to speed and providing thorough quality assurance throughout the development pipeline.

Here are some approaches that work well for us:

Active communication
Establishing communication channels, scheduling daily scrum calls, and providing regular updates helps assess urgent QA needs, relay project progress, and enhances cooperation and performance.

Ensuring cross-training
Cross-training curbs the learning curve, enables team members to develop a broader skill set, and ensures they can handle a larger share of project-related tasks.

Effective resource planning
• To ensure Test Leads possess proficient resource planning skills, Project and QA Managers can provide supervision and guidance during testing.
• This includes monitoring project timelines, ensuring optimal resource allocation, reallocating resources during peak periods, ensuring coverage during submissions or peaks, and ensuring resources are trained in current QA trends and tools during periods of low workload.

Managing a pool of trained resources
Managing your pool of trained testers effectively can minimize onboarding time and provide support for projects that require immediate assistance.

Continual improvement
This type of work never really ends. So, it’s important that you evaluate and refine your process based on lessons you learn from each engagement. By identifying areas of improvement, implementing changes, and monitoring outcomes you can help mitigate future challenges with greater efficiency.

Maintaining quality at scale

Beyond the release of a product, delivering quality is crucial to the player’s experience and overall project success. To maintain quality standards while scaling up the team, it’s crucial to have procedures in place.

• Systematically assessing project-related metrics to monitor the project's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) ensures productivity remains at a high standard. An easy way to do this is to have a senior resource (like a QA Manager) oversee your team or the project during each shift.
• You need a comprehensive documentation process and database for every project and client. Allocate hours for your Test Leads to create QA handbooks that serve as repositories to help new team members learn about the project and its processes independently. You can even take it a step further and create project-specific training modules to minimize onboarding time.
• Test Leads should also assess their team's KPIs to ensure they meet standards and are advancing in their current role while helping them prepare for future positions.
• It’s also important to monitor and assess the overall workload and ensure your team has the tools they need to perform. Automating QA testing makes scaling smoother by reducing your team’s learning curve and increasing its output.
• In the event of an incident, generating a post-mortem report and a Corrective Actions and Preventive Actions (CAPA) plan can prevent recurrence. These reports should be shared with all teams to ensure best practices are followed across all projects.

Balancing multiple projects

Success is not something you achieve—it’s rather a continuous process of improvement, and what may work for one project may not work for others. You want to treat each new engagement as a blank slate. However, while some strategies vary based on the project and requirements, your core best practices should remain unchanged.

Ensuring project success comes down to your team’s organization and adaptability. A strong team hierarchy is crucial for efficient communication, maintaining organization, and keeping operations smooth.

When managing multiple projects, you want to balance teams by workload and ensure each project has adequate senior support. This can mean assigning senior resources to critical or near-deadline projects.

Another important aspect of balancing multiple projects revolves around employee health and satisfaction. Offering flexible team and shift schedules, mitigates employee burnout and promotes a higher level productivity.

Lastly, to maintain the health and productivity of both your project and team, it helps to schedule regular reviews with partners at predefined intervals.

Challenges & solutions

At this point, it’s no secret that building the ultimate robust QA team is going to come with challenges. Here are some common issues you may encounter while scaling up your QA processes:

• For projects that demand specific skill sets and a reasonable learning curve, finding suitable talent can be quite challenging.
• Expansion efforts sometimes require expanding the hardware inventory as well. While procuring mobile devices and PCs is usually simple, test kits easily take up to four to six weeks (varying by region) to procure—not to mention occasional difficulties in securing mobile devices and PCs running outdated operating systems if the game is supporting older technology.
• Extensive growth can also mean establishing new infrastructure, which typically takes a minimum of one month.

Listed below are a few examples of challenges specific to processes or projects that we have faced while developing large-scale teams and managing multiple projects simultaneously.

Example 1: Client-specific training

Challenge: One of the primary productivity concerns expressed by a client revolved around the familiarity of the QA resources with the specific game series and testing tools they’d be working with.

Approach: To address this challenge, we implemented a client-specific training program for testers prior to their deployment to projects. This training was conducted by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from the respective projects and covered every aspect of the titles and tools they would be using. Following the training, each candidate underwent an assessment, and only those who successfully cleared the assessment were deployed to the client's project.

Impact: This approach significantly enhanced the quality of QA members assigned to the project, eliminating the need for constant supervision from senior members. Additionally, it effectively reduced the learning curve for the titles being tested to zero for the deployed testers.

Example 2: Adaptability

Challenge: Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, one of our key clients requested an expansion of their QA team. While meeting their requirements would have been routine if the teams were operating from the office, the situation presented unique challenges. Remote work made it more difficult for both the HR team and the QA team to onboard testers. However, the greater challenge lay in providing online training to these testers, as it is typically easier to provide on-the-job training under the supervision of senior resources.

Approach: The Project Managers and Test Leads collaborated with the HR team to conduct an online screening of candidates. Once shortlisted, these candidates were then placed under the guidance of Test Leads and Senior Testers. Recognizing that the primary challenge for the team was to adequately train the recruits, they extended their shifts to provide comprehensive training and ensure a seamless onboarding process without any gaps.

Impact: The client expressed satisfaction with the team's swift turnaround time and productivity. These newly recruited testers remain vital members of major projects for that client. What’s more, this success taught us how to handle similar requests more efficiently within shorter timeframes.

Building a reliable QA team

Building and managing a QA team is essential for delivering a polished product that leads to player satisfaction. However, finding the optimal solution comes with an array of challenges that vary from one game to the next.

The key is choosing the right model for your game and implementing strategies that promote collaboration and organization. With the right system in place, you can ensure your team remains self-sufficient, adaptable, and provides quality services you can depend on.

If you’re looking to outsource your quality assurance services to professionals or have questions about designing and building your own team, our experts at PTW are happy to help, backed by over 30 years of industry-leading experience.