Working with remote QA teams

Remote QA teams have been part of game testing for a very long time. When we talk about remote QA teams, we can consider them as follows:

• Outsourced professional QA companies
• Freelancers and collaborators (outsourced QA professionals)
• Internal employees working from home

In this chapter, we will focus on the first type and how to work with outsourced professional QA companies.

Almost all gaming studios will at some stage use outsourced QA. For example, localization QA is almost always done by outsourced, specialized QA companies. Sometimes, we also use them for other specialized kinds of testing, such as compliance testing. We already spoke about this in Chapter 3, A Deeper Look – Types of Testing in Games. Besides those, we also often use outsourced QA to support daily testing tasks.

While it is generally accepted that you don’t need any specific skills to work with remote, outsourced teams, that’s not...