The Automated Testing Roundtables are back again at GDC 2020!
Each session focuses on a different discipline, but cut across team sizes, budgets, genres, and platforms. We don't care if you're a iOS-only one-person indie or a console juggernaut, we just want to hear your voice!
Join the Community
Check out some of the talks around GDC 2020 that we recommend, and some of the vault talks we've enjoyed in the past.
If you'd like to keep in touch all year round, why not join our Discord?
Join the Discord!Wednesday, 2pm, Room 308 South
Beyond the software that we use to test our games are the people that write the tests and the workflows they use to reinforce them. How does the process work in your studio? Are the engineers responsible for automated tests, or QA? Are QA silo'd or integrated? What could be better?
Thursday, 10am, Room 308 South
As much as we would like otherwise, automated testing is still a rarity in our industry. Do you have a culture or a codebase that doesn't currently embrace automated testing? Are you having trouble getting people onboard, or maybe it was very easy and you want to share why? Grand failures are just as interesting as successes!
Friday, 11:30am, Room 308 South
Software automation has many faces, from locally-run functional and unit tests, to server-driven continuous integration, and even external device farms. How do you do automated testing in your team? What works well for you? More interestingly, what didn't work and why?
More automated testing talks at GDC
Here's a selection of GDC 2020 talks that we think might be interesting to Automated Testing Roundtable attendees. Add them to your schedule now!
If you've spotted any that you think would be interesting to roundtable attendees, let us know in the discord or email andrew@autotestingroundtable.com.
Nicholas Walsh, Brandon Bouier
All Passes
Monday, 1:20pm, Room 3001 West
Sponsored talks are always free even to expo pass holders, so they can be very useful. And there's no reason why automated testing shouldn't extend to cover player-to-player interaction as well!
David Paris
Tools Summit - All Access Pass, Core+Summits Pass, Summits Pass
Monday, 4:40pm, Room 3004 West
How did Playground Games introduce a testing culture to an already-shipped game, and why? What did they learn, and how do they plan to improve?
Yahav Biran, Neelam Koshiya
All Passes
Tuesday, 5:30pm, Room 3001 West
This looks like a great intro to continuous integration and delivery from AWS. Obviously it's going to lean on their services hard, but you shouldn't let that stop you attending if the takeaways sound useful.
Yingfeng Chen, Xiao Li
Machine Learning Summit - All Access Pass, Core+Summits Pass, Summits Pass
Tuesday, 5:30pm, Room 202 South
This session will introduce new ML and AI techniques that have been used in the testing of the Netease MMORPG game - "Justice", which helps to build an intelligent testing system for three typical game testing scenarios: quests regression testing, class balancing testing and dungeons testing.
Eldo Jose
All Access Pass, Core+Summits Pass, Core Pass
Wednesday, 2pm, Room 210 South
How did Netherrealm provide non-technical QA users with a fexible framework to build tests, and how did that lead to an exponential increase in test coverage? What unique challenges did they face?
Geoff Evans
All Access Pass, Core+Summits Pass, Core Pass
Thursday, 10am, Room 314 South
The Tools Roundtables normally have a great deal of overlap with the Automated Testing Roundtables, and this session epecially will. Geoff is an excellent moderator, and the chat promises to be interesting and productive.
Tom Thompson
All Access Pass, Core+Summits Pass, Core Pass
A session diving into the practice of Property-Based Testing, which has wider acceptance outside of the games industry. Property-based testing can give you great coverage, including finding unexpected edge cases, for little upfront cost!
Interesting talks to watch right now
Here are some that we've enjoyed in previous years. If you know one that we haven't got listed here, from any year, let us know by dropping by the discord, or email andrew@autotestingroundtable.com.
Jonas Gillberg, GDC 2019
Bots designed specifically to help testing can be incredibly valuable. This talk provides some useful insight on how to develop and manage the workflow of such a system in a large team.
Jose Paredes, Pete Jones, GDC 2019
Bots seem to be a theme of GDC 2019! This is an hour session, compared to the 30min for the Battlefield session listed above, so looks to go into more detail.
We'd recommend seeing both if you can!
Robert Masella @ZipLockBagMan, GDC 2019
See Robert describe how Rare used multiple tiers of tests in unreal engine to have the confidence to ship Sea of Thieves updates every week.
Also features the most astounding bug count graph in GDC history.
Adrian Yu, GDC 2019
A talk by veteran roundtabler Adrian Yu on how EA uses Jenkins for continuous integration and deployment - vital tools in the belt of any serious automated tester.
His talk is more than just a dive into Jenkins, as he promises to explain how they manage spam and notifications to make them truely useful, rather than noisy.
Michael Vork Larsen, GDC 2019
How RETO MOTO maintain stability in their live service game by involving QA early in an aglie process, including using automated testing.
Heros & Generals is a game that's been running for a while, so this promises to have some great insights.
Amy Phillips @amy_phillips, GDC 2018
Play on the Vault, FREE!
How to improve the stability of your game by linking tools together and optimizing the path that bugs take between being introduced and being closed.
Jan van Valburg, GDC 2018
Play on the Vault, FREE!
You will learn about the inner workings of Call of Duty's automated building and testing tooling, it's various unique features, and how its ideas might be applied to your own projects.
Nicholas Routhier, GDC 2018
Play on the Vault, FREE!
Daily automated testing of world design data is a game changer. Attendees will learn how it helps world builders in their daily tasks, allows for more iteration time, provides data for evidence based decision making and makes for a much smoother debug phase.
Jafar Soltani, GDC 2018
Play on the Vault, FREE!
You will learn about the benefits of adopting "continuous delivery" in AAA video games, what challenges you'd face and what practices you can use.
If you have any questions or just want to say hi: andrew@autotestingroundtable.com, @tenpn