Q&A

Q: You say the initial impact of developer achievement on non-QA testing time was dramatic - what about the long term impact.

A: Long term, we saw an increase in non-QA testing time of about 20-25%.

Q: How do you deal with the increased number of bugs filed on the project as a result of deploying telemetry enabled bug filing.

A: On Dragon Age, we used several methods to handle the large volume of bugs generated and resolved each day:

• • Gatekeepers. Most departments had a single gatekeeper that would review bugs filed to filter out duplicates and bugs without value. Often these gatekeepers were embedded technical QA, but in some cases the team lead take that responsibility.

  • By generating automated reports about bugs that went 'stale' and harassing people to keep tight control of their issues list, we managed to prevent the bug database from filling up with old, potentially invalid issues. QA very aggressively regressed older issues to ensure they were still valid.