Back from Korea

I know I don’t write that frequently, but I have an excuse for the extended break this time – a five week visit to South Korea. I had thought about advertising my absence, but it occurred to me that if there is some criminally minded person paying attention to my blog, they could quite easily find out where I live and rob me of my meagre possessions.

Perhaps I’m just projecting onto my readers…I apologise, but I assume that all good testers are potential criminal masterminds!

There are a few important things I took from my Korean trip –

• I really don’t know much Korean.
• Immersion is a great way to learn.
• The Korean yahoo homepage (www.yahoo.co.kr) isn’t as crazy as I thought it was.
• Korean game testers are different (from the game testers that I know).
• Don’t buy from a Buddhist
• We have great coffee in Australia, but Koreans have Poka-Yoke coffee.
• It is still possible to play arcades for 20c (or less).
• Small differences can keep you on your toes.
• Amusement parks are kind of freaky when you’re the only person in them.
• Don’t touch the windows.
• King Sejong was a smart guy.
• Marrying your wife twice is twice as good.

More on these later…

After extending my stay, I also managed to attend the Korea Game Conference and GStar tradeshow. I think I had expected the audience to be a little more international. See if you can spot the lone caucasian in the crowd here.

I attended the two sessions on testing ” QA Operation and Process by the game producing step”
by SinAe Kim and “Game QA organizing and Process set-up cases”. These presentations described the experiences of a large Internet portal’s game development studio as they attempted to improve the quality of their published games. They test a mix of in-house and externally developed titles.

I was somewhat surprised at the testing approach described, as it seemed quite corporate, and not product-like at all. This is explained to some degree, I believe, by the relative youth of the Korean games industry. Most likely, testing expertise is more easily found in business environments. My impressions from the conference and brief conversation with Sinae suggested that she and her team were learning a great deal about the ways in which the testing processes of banks and other corporates are unsuited to mass-market product development.

The areas on which their testing focused were –

• Specification testing
• Compatibility testing
• Performance testing
• Security/Exploitation/Abuse testing

Interestingly, they don’t do gameplay testing before completing functional testing, whereas it is more commonly performed the other way around. Tune the fundamentals, then fix the bugs.

I must add that I don’t yet fully understand the Korean games market. There is a lot that you can play for free, but I don’t have a full understanding of where all the money comes from.