This is SEGA TEST

I love the way everyone appears to hate their job.

 

Very interesting! I work as a software tester myself, so it's interesting to see all the analogs to the work I do daily. (Though obviously a lot less 90's) Some interesting insights into the workings at SoA here, like how they call it a "rev". Definitely reminds me of every training video I've ever seen.

Can confirm; software testing sucks the life out of you. :P

 

Oh I know all too well, but I figured the whole point of a company video is to... make it look appealing

I.e. not highlight how you'll be working horrible hours and how the Pico is unpleasant.


Worryingly the fascination of bug databases and several layers of pointless oversight is something that keeps popping up at my work. As a species we're not learning anything!

 

Certainly the intent (they even talk about career advancement), but I would say this has the same problem every other training video has: low production values.

 

I loved this video, it's so freaking 90's but it's epic! :v: When I was a child I wanted to be a game tester, but now knowing that they work long grueling hours, and tend to replay the same level over and over again it really doesn't sound all that great to me anymore. I'd rather be the one working on the games, or better yet the one to fix the errors.

 

Its certainly more productive for the programmers to test the software, especially if its a game.
When you are working on certain feature, you'll know yourself that 90-95% of the new bugs would be related to testing this specific feature, or in most of the other cases it'll break or glitch something very obvious that you see on every playthrough.
You might need no more than 5 minutes of personal testing on every hour of programming.

Of course you still have periods when you bring in testers to try everything possible to break the product.

For a fulltime tester it is not hard to see how spending 40 hours a week testing a game that takes 40 minutes to go through would get tedious and even annoying.

 

There's various stages of testing - when it comes to Sega of America at least, the dedicated testing unit typically gets near-final ROMs with the simple instruction of "break it".

You can actually see the sorts of games they were getting right now as drx releases things. Late revisions and release candidates - known, easy to replicate bugs would have been logged and fixed prior to this (you would hope).

 

Beats being a shitshoveler.

 

Nice documentary :O

I enjoyed the technicalities involved the most, don't really care about much else, nice to see nontheless.