As a Roblox developer, I often rely on conducting QA tests to test updates for my game. QA testing is an industry standard that is time-tested and proven to catch bugs, design problems, and more with a software product.
Because of this fact, developer relations used to provide a QA testing service, known as the “devrel QA program”. Historically, it was used to test official Roblox events (such as the egg hunts) and was ran by @Hippie_ofDoom. In recent years, it has been opened up to the public as a public QA testing service. Developers could schedule QA tests with the service to have their experiences tested by over 40 QA testers. This resulted in a lot of useful analytics and feedback being sent to the developers. My game, “Super Skyward Towers” (currently an accelerator project) would not be where it is today without this service. Overall, it was an extremely valuable service provided by developer relations!
However, with hippie’s recent departure from Roblox corp. as an employee, Roblox has decided to completely shut down & cut ties with its QA program. This resulted in many studios (my own included) being left without any ability to QA test their experiences. This is a massive problem, since many smaller studios do not have the resources or infrastructure to get their own QA testers. Developer Relations has essentially shut down a critical service with no warning and no replacement for said service. This increases the difficulty of being a Roblox developer, and hinders the changes of successfully launching an experience. This is a problem!
As such, Roblox needs to bring back its official QA program. It built a great community over the years, and was a win-win-win scenario for Roblox, Roblox developers, and QA testers. An argument that is commonly made against this is “Why can’t developers form their own QA communities?”. However, this is not a solution! The Roblox-provided QA program worked because it provided an incentive to QA testers. Being able to test games in a Roblox-backed environment with the potential for cool accessories (QA testing tophat, QA testing valk, etc) was a massive incentive for QA testers to test games. It generated hype around what would otherwise be an activity that is hard to find volunteers for. The amount of testers that have joined because “it’s cool to test Roblox events” are many.
Overall, QA testing is a critically important part of the development cycle. It’s just as important as content updates and code review! If there were internal issues with the Roblox-provided program, those should be ironed out instead of completely shutting out developers from QA testing! It’s simply not a solution, and I really hope Roblox can reconsider its actions with the QA program.
I have to say, when QA tested my game, it helped me out a lot, and I’ll give credit to that. However, my biggest gripe with QA was its overall system on how they determine who can be NDA, and who gets the free items. I’ve seen it and it’s unfortunate, people are skipping school and classes just to be considered active. I’ve been to several tests, and yet the system has decided I wasn’t active. On top of that, with the items being introduced, it’s a nice incentive to have, however, the sincerity of people testing has decreased because all they care about is getting that item.
I would be happy to see QA come back and be run by Roblox as it did benefit me and other developers, however, please address these issues. Even if NDA and all that private testing don’t come back, having a group of people ready to test our games is good enough for me. It helps identify the issues and patch them before release.
I agree that QA is an important part of development and it’d be great to bring it back, however, not in the way that it was previously ran.
As Wooley mentioned, the QA had a very difficult and weird method of gaining NDA testers. You either had to give up literally everything in your life and grind for it or be part of an official program that required QA in order to get it and even then, you could’ve been denied only because you looked at someone and they didn’t like it. Like myself, I know many with lots of experience in Quality Assurance that have been blocked from the program because a manager didn’t personally like the applicant and not for any other valid factor like a lack of experience.
Another issue being the lack of actual presence of staff. While I am sure that Hippie has been around for the program the amount of “crap talking” and overall negativity that’s been going around in the NDA section of the program has been disturbing to say the least. I’ve had a few friends who’ve been part of the program tell me stories about how even in the presence of Hippie, there’d be smack talking about public testers or users the group deemed “unfit”.
Personally I believe that this is what ruined QA the most. Instead of having users passionate about the QA and have them appreciate seeing their observations and suggestions change the direction of a feature to “omg I just want a hat that no one else can have!!!” with some of these people being less than pleasant to anyone else but their own. I’ve seen people talk about how they skip school just to even have a shot at getting those items which is very unhealthy at best.
Overall I fully agree that a Roblox-backed program would be great to have but not like that. With the direction it was going, it would’ve been a matter of time before the group would’ve been deemed “child labor” and put the platform in genuine problem. It is honestly a miracle that no one has fount the group when it was more “trendy” to throw low blows at Roblox. In the meantime, there are a few groups cropping out to fill in the void left by the program. I highly recommend checking them out!
@crabmeta brought up an interesting idea on discord:
If Roblox wants to offer QA as a service to devs they can form that unit officially and pay testers as a pooled resource, have some managers to manage the program and offer it to devs via dev rel.
