Quality Assurance Team

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The Quality Assurance Team, often simply abbreviated to QA, are a department of Jagex employees who ensure that software at Jagex meets end-user requirements. There are multiple QA teams which serve different Jagex products, primarily RuneScape and Old School RuneScape.

Role

QA assure that the game runs smoothly and is high quality for the players. They test new updates to make sure that there are no bugs, but are also responsible for maintaining all of the content in the live game through investigating player reports, and submitting feedback for post-release changes based on player suggestions.

Testing

“	Of the handful of bugs that do make it into the game, the QA team have already found several hundreds of them before the content is launched.	”
— Mod Stacey

The Quality Assurance team tests new content after it has been developed and tries to find errors to help make the game better and easier to use.

Playing the game is only part of what the Quality Assurance team goes through during their part of the development process. Checklists make sure that the new content works right and meshes with the content already in the game. Each of these tests has to be done many different times under a number of different conditions.

Even after all of this testing, opening the content up to millions of players brings out problems that the QA team has missed. Players also work to fix the bugs by sending in feedback and bug reports – it would almost be impossible to fix all of the bugs on release, as there are hundreds of thousands of players for every QA team member.

Bug reports

Players can submit bug reports to the QA team in-game; however, more often than not, the QA team receive bugs that do not have enough information to investigate, due to lack of detail. It is also common for the QA team to receive reports that are not actual bugs, due to it often being player confusion.

Live maintenance

Live maintenance is the Quality Assurance's job in which they track what the players are saying about new content by reading the forums and checking bugs sent in by the bug tracker. They alert the developers to the problem and the developers work to fix the bug. Good and bad feedback helps the QA team to learn what the players that play RuneScape enjoy.

The Quality Assurance team also investigate all player bug reports, and submit reports to the development team for fixing. They classify bugs as Critical, Major or Minor which the development team use as an indicator for its urgency, so they can shift workload to ensure fixes are released in good time. The QA team confirm the bug fixes in their development and release build, before confirming it can go live to RuneScape players.

Teams

Scrum team

Jagex has several Scrum teams that focus on creating individual, unique pieces of content for RuneScape. The QA team are embedded within the development team, meaning that they work directly next to the developers, designers and artists to deliver content as a small focused team. They are involved in the content from beginning to end, contributing toward the design and development, before focusing on the testing and maintenance of content for years to come. Some QA members are skilled enough in code to create their own content, while being supervised by senior developers.

Release team

In 2014, Jagex formed a QA team that handle all of the releases before being handed to RuneScape players. Any content that is required for a release is packaged together into a single build, so that the Release QA team are able to confirm that all of the required content has come together safely, and has not conflicted with other areas of the game. They perform both manual, and automated tests to ensure build stability, and also confirm any bug fixes for existing content that are due to go out into the live game. This team plays a vital role within the development process, and it is this team that allows Scrum teams to focus on the next big thing, without having to worry about re-testing everything in a new build.

Members

In 2013 Jagex introduced a career path for the RuneScape QA team, allowing team members to progress from QA Tester, to Senior and Lead roles. This also included the creation of the Junior role, which is used to hire people that have limited, or no QA experience and are trained on the job. It is common for Jagex to place players into Junior roles as they have no previous QA experience.

RuneScape employees

Picture	Name	Nationality	Role	Employed in
	Mod Purpur	German	Senior Localisation Specialist (German)	2014
	Mod Chaose	N/A	RuneScape Content QA Analyst; QA Lore Specialist	2013
N/A	Mod Giara	N/A	RuneScape Content QA Analyst; Mobile Team
	Mod Grem	N/A	QA Tools Developer
N/A	Mod Kitty	N/A	QA Analyst
N/A	Mod Kristy	N/A	QA Analyst
	Mod Noldor	N/A	Tech QA Analyst	6 April 2004
N/A	Mod Sarah	American	QA Analyst
	Mod Veda	N/A	Junior QA Analyst	2017
	Mod Cel	N/A	QA Analyst
	Mod Breezy	N/A	Junior QA Analyst	July 2018
N/A	Mod Iago	N/A	QA Analyst
N/A	Mod Pebble	N/A	QA Analyst	December 2017
	Mod Camel	N/A	QA Analyst
	Mod Forza	N/A	QA Analyst	29 April 2019
N/A	Mod Halo	N/A	QA Analyst	9 October 2019

OldSchool RuneScape

Picture	Name	Nationality	Role	Employed in
	Mod Curse	N/A	Senior RuneScape Content QA Analyst	7 July 2014
	Mod Roq	N/A	Upload Manager	2016
	Mod Mary Day	N/A	Junior QA Analyst
N/A	Mod Argo	N/A	QA Analyst	26 May 2020
	Mod Bruno	N/A	QA Analyst	18 June 2018
N/A	Mod Gecko	N/A	QA Analyst	2 April 2020
N/A	Mod Katies	N/A	QA Analyst	2 April 2020
	Mod Wolfy	N/A	Principal QA Analyst	3 November 2020

Former

Picture	Name	Nationality	Role	Employed in	Left in
	Mod Harrison	N/A	RuneScape QA Analyst	2014	9 October 2019
N/A	Mod Manti	Lithuanian	QA Analyst	2014	28 April 2017
	Mod Dolan	N/A	Quality Analyst	2014	25 October 2019
	Mod Cocoa	N/A	Head of Quality Assurance	2009	2019
N/A	Mod Cuppa	N/A	Senior RuneScape Content QA Analyst		4 May 2018
N/A	Mod Jam	N/A	Quality Assurance Tester		2019
	Mod James H	N/A	Lead QA Analyst (Growth Team)	22 May 2006	5 December 2019
	Mod TomH	N/A	RuneScape QA Analyst		February 2018
	Mod Wolf	N/A	Old School RuneScape QA Analyst	January 2014	30 September 2019
	Mod Pingu	British	Systems Designer	2014	7 June 2019
	Mod Kelpie	N/A	Producer	2011	2019
	Mod Day	N/A	Junior QA Analyst	2 June 2015	28 August 2015