Automated Testing is back for the fifth year of roundtables at GDC 2019!
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!
You'll find a roundtable on every day of the main conference, Wednesday-Friday, and also a special hangout in the gardens after the Wednesday roundtable. The hangout doesn't require a conference pass!
Join the Community
Check out some of the talks around GDC 2019 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 214 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?
And from here, walk straight over to the meetup in the park!
Wednesday, 3.15pm, Yuna Buena Gardens
Walk over with us from the wednesday roundtable to the park to sit and chat more automated testing. Or if you can't make the roundtable, come and meet some like-minded people!
Thursday, 5.30pm, Room 214 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!
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 2019
We'll be filling this up in due course with promising talks from the conference scheduler.
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.
Ben Sunshine-Hill
AI Summit, Tuesday, 3pm, Room 2002 West
A talk from Havok AI's Ben Sunshine-Hill about using specifications and automated testing to create flexible and stable systems.
Ben is a frequent speaker at GDC and always gives really interesting talks. Recommended, even if you're not an AI programmer.
Jonas Gillberg
AI Summit, Tuesday, 4.40pm, Room 2002 West
Bots designed specifically to help testing can be incredibly valuable. This talk looks to provide some useful insight on how to develop and manage the workflow of such a system in a large team.
Gunther Gong, Brandon Liu, Yue Wang, Shiwei Zhang
Sponsored Session, Wednesday, 10:30am, Room 2000 West
This talk on shipping PUBG on mobile touches on CI and automated testing, which will we are sure will be useful to anyone reading this.
Sponsored sessions aren't necessarily less interesting than main conf talks, and have the added bonus of being accessible to summit and (some) expo pass holders!
Robert Masella @ZipLockBagMan
Thursday, 10am, Room 2010 West
It seem everyone has a failure story about how they attempted automated testing of gameplay and came away with their tails between their legs.
Rare already has automated testing pedegree, so this looks like an exciting chance to learn about how gameplay testing can work.
Jose Paredes, Pete Jones
Bots at GDC seem to be a theme this year! This is an hour session, compared to the 30min for the Battlefield session on Tuesday, so looks to go into more detail. However not everyone can access the main conference talks.
We'd recommend going to both if you can!
Adrian Yu
Thursday, 5.30pm, Room 202 South
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 sounds interesting because it's 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
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.
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.
Amy Phillips
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
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
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
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