Quality Assurance Team
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.
Contents
Role[edit | edit source]
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[edit | edit source]
“ | 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[1] |
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[edit | edit source]
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.[source needed]
Live maintenance[edit | edit source]
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.[source needed]
Teams[edit | edit source]
Scrum team[edit | edit source]
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[edit | edit source]
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.[source needed]
Members[edit | edit source]
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.[source needed]
RuneScape employees[edit | edit source]
Picture | Name | Nationality | Role | Employed in |
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Mod Purpur | German | Senior Localisation Specialist (German) | 2014 |
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Mod Chaose | N/A | RuneScape Content QA Analyst; QA Lore Specialist | 2013 |
N/A | Mod Giara | N/A | RuneScape Content QA Analyst; Mobile Team | |
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Mod Grem | N/A | QA Tools Developer | |
N/A | Mod Kitty | N/A | QA Analyst | |
N/A | Mod Kristy | N/A | QA Analyst | |
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Mod Noldor | N/A | Tech QA Analyst | 6 April 2004 |
N/A | Mod Sarah | American | QA Analyst | |
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Mod Veda | N/A | Junior QA Analyst | 2017 |
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Mod Cel | N/A | QA Analyst | |
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Mod Breezy | N/A | Junior QA Analyst | July 2018[2] |
N/A | Mod Iago | N/A | QA Analyst | |
N/A | Mod Pebble | N/A | QA Analyst | December 2017[3] |
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Mod Camel | N/A | QA Analyst | |
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Mod Forza | N/A | QA Analyst | 29 April 2019 |
N/A | Mod Halo | N/A | QA Analyst | 9 October 2019 |
OldSchool RuneScape[edit | edit source]
Picture | Name | Nationality | Role | Employed in |
---|---|---|---|---|
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Mod Curse | N/A | Senior RuneScape Content QA Analyst | 7 July 2014 |
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Mod Roq | N/A | Upload Manager | 2016 |
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Mod Mary Day | N/A | Junior QA Analyst | |
N/A | Mod Argo | N/A | QA Analyst | 26 May 2020 |
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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 |
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Mod Wolfy | N/A | Principal QA Analyst | 3 November 2020 |
Former[edit | edit source]
Picture | Name | Nationality | Role | Employed in | Left in |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
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Mod Harrison | N/A | RuneScape QA Analyst | 2014[4] | 9 October 2019[5] |
N/A | Mod Manti | Lithuanian | QA Analyst | 2014[6] | 28 April 2017[6] |
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Mod Dolan | N/A | Quality Analyst | 2014 | 25 October 2019[7] |
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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 | |
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Mod James H | N/A | Lead QA Analyst (Growth Team) | 22 May 2006[8] | 5 December 2019[9] |
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Mod TomH | N/A | RuneScape QA Analyst | February 2018 | |
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Mod Wolf | N/A | Old School RuneScape QA Analyst | January 2014 | 30 September 2019 |
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Mod Pingu | British | Systems Designer | 2014 | 7 June 2019 |
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Mod Kelpie | N/A | Producer | 2011 | 2019[10] |
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Mod Day | N/A | Junior QA Analyst | 2 June 2015 | 28 August 2015 |
References[edit | edit source]
RuneScape | |
Old School RuneScape | |
Former |