GDC 2014 adds new QA Summit talks from Google, 5th Planet and more

Game Developers Conference 2014 organizers have revealed a few new QA Summit talks for its March conference, including sessions explaining how to launch your own QA department, how to test mobile apps the Google way, and much more. These talks are part of the QA Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, March 17 and Tuesday, March 18 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of GDC 2014. As part of the Summit, 5th Planet Games CTO David Lease is giving an interesting talk about how studios can benefit by bringing their fans deeper into the quality assurance process. In his session, titled QA via the Masses: Tapping into Player Enthusiasm to Improve QA, Lease plans to highlight the positive side of exposing the design, development and QA testing of your game to your greatest fans. The idea is that more transparency will make your community feel more involved with your project while lightening your workload, and Lease plans to use examples from 5th Planet Games’ portfolio to show how you can pull it off. A pair of engineers from the Google Play Games team are giving a technical talk titled Making Every Crash Count: Effective Mobile Game Testing that should be pretty interesting to anyone who has ever struggled to release a solid mobile game on a tight schedule. Google’s Dave Santoro and Sean Robertson -- software and testing engineers, respectively -- plan to explain how techniques like layered testing and automation can help you develop better mobile titles more quickly, with less wasted time than if you were to rely on manual testing. Finally, Apptio QA wizard Robb Nicholas is coming to GDC 2014 to give a talk guiding attendees through the basics of building a quality assurance division from scratch. His talk, A Survey of the Modern QA Department, is basically QA 101 -- attendees can expect to learn what a contemporary QA division does, what tools and techniques are used, and how to set one up -- including some real talk about budgeting, managing communication between testers and developers, the works. Well, it’s only an hour long, so maybe not quite the works -- more like a thorough overview to get you started on the right path. For more information on these or others in the show's growing lineup, check out GDC 2014's official Schedule Builder, which continues to add new talks every week. GDC 2014 itself will take place March 17-21 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. For more information on GDC 2014, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.