QA
Also said as Quality assurance, Game testing, Testing
The work of finding what is broken before players do, by testing every system, edge and combination on purpose and writing bugs up so they can be reproduced. It is skilled work and often underpaid.
Players all walk the same few roads, so they find the same few bugs. A tester walks into every corner, and a bug report that says exactly how to reproduce a bug is what makes it fixable.
Say it
“Test the save system by pulling the power during a save, filling the disk, and loading a save from the previous build. Report each one with the exact steps and the build number.”
Where you’ve seen it
Rare described at GDC in 2019 how it built automated tests into Sea of Thieves, so that gameplay features were checked by machine after every change and human testers could spend their time on what machines can't judge.
Not to be confused with playtest
QA asks "is anything broken?" and tries to break it. A playtest asks "is this good?" and tries not to interfere.