Substack Newsletter
Articles about all things test automation and upstream quality in games.
GDC 2021 Conference Session
This session was presented at the Game Developers Conference 2021 by our founder, Henry Golding. It explains the approach he used on Sea of Thieves and Minecraft to build a culture where developers write fast, reliable automated tests as part of their day-to-day work, creating a safety net that catches bugs as soon as they are written.
Expand 1-minute summary…
Henry led the automated test frameworks team on Sea of Thieves and led a similar team on Minecraft. Sea of Thieves used Continuous Delivery with automated tests to release weekly to players, with a tiny manual test team. Henry presents the principles that worked on both games to support the adoption of automated testing:
- Having a small team to own the transition
- Meeting the codebase where it is with appropriate test frameworks
- Biasing first for adoption of test frameworks, and then shifting focus to scaling them
- Involving developers as allies and partners, and getting the right support from leadership
Henry presents an innovative style of test framework that allows unit-like tests to be written for game code without decoupling the code under test. Through this framework developers are unblocked to start writing tests, leading ultimately to more true unit tests being written as testing experience grows.
Game Automated Testing Resource Hub
A curated collection of resources useful for anyone interested in automated testing for games – conference talks, papers, books, articles, podcasts, and more. Started by our founder, Henry Golding, in January 2022.
Lophus Labs LLC 