Thomas Hulvershorn is a lead game tester at Oberon Media owned company, I-Play. Working with downloadable PC titles such as Womens Murder Club 4 and social networking applications such as BubbleTown, Thomas manages project milestones and works as part of a very close knit team to help add final touches to I-Play's games and get them released on time.
Thomas recently attended the University of Bolton to give a guest lecture on his current role in the industry, what it entails, the benefits it creates and how post-graduates are able to get into it. After previously working alongside Thomas by doing some voluntary testing on I-Play's latest title, Dream Day Wedding, I felt the talk would be relevant to my interests and hoped to learn even more about a role I'm most likely going to be looking to pursue nearer to the end of my time at University.
Thomas began the lecture speaking about the sort of downloadable PC titles that I-Play create and how they go about testing them. Different types of 'test lingo' were mentioned, with Thomas explaining the meanings of Functional Testing / Non-Functional Testing, Black Box Testing / White Box, Testing and Regression Testing / Re-Testing. An overview of Thomas' teams project methodologies was also given, with I-Play using a mix of both Agile and SCRUMM, similarly as to with we handle our Team Project work.
Facebook games was the next topic of discussion, with Thomas giving his views on how they've both affected the industry and how he feels his company can further make use of them. Two interesting quotes given by Thomas on this subject were; "Facebook games are services, not games!" and "Facebook games are like an infection, and their testing process is completely different than with normal games." I found his insight into Facebook games very interesting and definitely agree it's a fantastic opportunity to further expand the games market.
Further detail was given into testing processes, with the Funnel Analysis process and the BCS / ISTBQ being explained. Funnel analysis was interesting, displaying the amount of users who install a title on Facebook up until the users who go through with micro-transactions. Thomas gave some rough figures, stating on average around 10% of people who install a game on Facebook will actually play further than the first level. Some insight into how I-Play handle risk assessment and time management was given next, processes that were all too familiar to me after working with two team project modules at University.
Overall, I thought the lecture with Thomas gave much useful information on both social networking games and the role of a games tester. I hope to further aid I-Play and volunteer once again as a student tester when needed.
http://www.iplay.com/index.aspx?GEO=ROTW
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