Trese Brothers Q&A

[pendell]

As a developer myself -- though not of games -- I am continuously impressed with the high quality Trese Brothers puts out.  Sure, there are rule issues but those are game mechanics.  The game itself is stable and rarely behaves in a bizarre way.

Which leads me to ask a few questions out of professional interest:

1) It's just the two of you.  How do you structure your QA? You mentioned you run thousands of games in testing. What harness do you use to do this? 

2) How do you structure testing in terms of unit test, integration, and across the various platforms you support?  

3) Obviously you used volunteer testers during alpha. How is customer feedback integrated into this?  

4) What percentage of your total development goes into QA and testing?  Would you add a full-time QA manager/dedicated tester if you had the money? 

I'm asking these questions because obviously as a two-man shop you have no time to spare on anything not absolutely critical to your releases. Yet you respond quickly and well to customer feedback, patching bugs and introducing improved play with a lifecycle speed that was almost unheard of even five years ago. I'm curious as to how it's done. 

Respectfully, 

Brian P. 

[fallen]

Jul 21, 2014 14:56:20 GMT -5 pendell said:

I'm asking these questions because obviously as a two-man shop you have no time to spare on anything not absolutely critical to your releases. Yet you respond quickly and well to customer feedback, patching bugs and introducing improved play with a lifecycle speed that was almost unheard of even five years ago. I'm curious as to how it's done. 

pendell - the question is about priorities. We believe strongly in the important of our community, and you all play a huge role in making sure that Cory and I are having fun, so while customer feedback and community support may not be "release critical" they are high on our priority list.

And if we weren't having fun, we'd actually have to sleep. And then none of this would get done.

1) Yes, it is just the two of us. We share tasks constantly and check each other's work. This is effective as we have big overlaps in our skill set. We write much of our own automated testing frameworks.
2) Complicated answer, but the baseline is that we develop a strong process, automation, a stack of devices, and try always to put quality over timeline.
3) Integrating customer feedback is a core pillar of the Trese Brothers mission. It is continuous, alpha or not. In the alpha, we put a big spotlight on customer feedback from those amazing teams and are always dedicating additional time, nights and weekends to keeping up with them and responding to their input. At this point, we could not imagine releasing a game without a community alpha.
4) We track a lot of numbers, but I don't have a solid answer in that regard. It's a lot. If we had the money, a QA manager / dedicated tester would not be in the list of top 3 new hires. Also, as a small company the word "dedicated" seems like it doesn't fit. Cory and I have both have a stack of hats on our head so tall ...