Shipping Faster With Test Automation in Unreal (Europe)
Struggling with fragile features and zombie bugs?
Wishing you could playlets earlier and interate faster?
Want to get the most from your QA budget?
Join this online workshop with gamedev and automation expert Andrew Fray and learn the pragmatic ways you can use tools already in your engine to have your game start testing itself.
Well-implemented test automation, even a small amount, can bring useful benefits to any team, including:
Increasing stability, allowing you to playtest earlier and add features later
Freeing QA time to focus on destructive testing and qualitative feedback, rather than monotonous checklists
Faster iteration, giving you a safety net for deep changes
What you'll learn
In this workshop, you'll learn about the most useful test types for beginners:
Asset tests: validating on-disk data like textures, meshes and game data to catch bugs before the game even boots
Smoke tests: holistic tests that are simple to create and maintain
Actor tests: ensuring the functionality of gameplay code with minimal dependencies
We'll build each of those tests into an existing Unreal project that wasn't designed for test automation, ending the day having learned a whole lot and implemented some production-quality tests.
You'll finish the day understanding:
The benefits of test automation for teams of all sizes and budgets
The fail-fast-fail-hard mindset, and the benefits that mindset brings even if you don't do any automation
The three most useful test types and when to use them
Which of Unreal's automation frameworks best fit each type of test, including Spec and CQTest.
What types of tests to avoid
How to structure good tests to make them readable, maintainable and trustworthy
Who you are
Programmers (including solo devs) who:
want to ship more reliable code that can be iterated on and refactored more easily
want to get the most out of their limited QA budgets
Aspiring QA Engineers or SDETs who:
can already program a little
want to be empowered to solve their own problems
Prerequisites:
You should have some unreal c++ programming knowledge, but you don't have to be an expert
You don't need any pre-existing knowledge of test automation
You don't need to be from any particular size of studio - this automation approach can scale to work for one-person indies or for much larger teams
You should have a relatively private space from which to attend an all-day virtual workshop
What people are saying
I would highly recommend working with Andrew to any team who have a sense that they would get a lot of value from automated testing, but no clear idea where to start.
➡ Ricky Haggett, Designer & Founder, Hollow Ponds
We were delighted with the progress made and are keen to leverage the new skills and processes.
➡ Bruce Heather, Technical Director, Teach Your Monster
"Even fairly late in the project lifecycle, we were able to hugely improve build health, and are saving hours of dev and tester time every day"
➡ Daniel Gronner, QA Lead, Nosebleed Interactive
I really enjoyed our sessions with Andrew, and would highly recommend him. He's very friendly and approachable, and a patient teacher. He also has a bad-ass Lego collection.
➡ Neil Goodman, Lead Developer, Nerial
Your Facilitator
Andrew Fray is a BAFTA-winning games programmer, lead and automation consultant with over two decades of experience in the industry. He's worked on both AAA and indie titles, on genres from racing to puzzle, shipping on PC, console, and mobile. Notable titles include Rollerdrome, Alphabear and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3.
Since writing his first shipping test in 2010, Andrew has implemented processes, created build servers, trained teams and written tests, both as a lead and as a consultant.
Andrew runs the Automated Testing In Games community (https://atig.dev), moderates the Automated Testing roundtables at GDC, and has spoken around the world on test automation in video games.