Dear Amazon team,
As this is the third time, you guys are experiencing last-minute issues, i strongly suggest changing the process.
My suggestion is to organize a beta environment. Before applying a patch to a live environment, let it be stabilized on a beta environment with either free or limited invite.
All other publishers(GameOn, Mail.ru) have beta and live issues are at their minimum.
And the process is the following - patch is applied to beta, 2 weeks of player-based testing on top of additional specific quality assurance(load and performance tests), and only then published to live.
Additional costs, that these last-minute issues bring far outweight the investments required to do it normally:
- Reputational issues.
- Compensation packages.
- Team overtime.
- Schedule issues.
On top of it, please, audit the quality assurance process, whether it is outsourced to AGS or you have your own team:
- Does the QA team have enough time and resources to test the build?
- Does the QA team executes regression testing, making sure they not only test new features but also make sure they didn’t brake connected features?
- Does the QA team provides a traceability matrix after the execution(what test were executed for each feature)? Is it enough to say that it is all good?
- Does the QA team use test automation? How much code is covered by unit, integration, and e2e tests?
I really want the game to prosper and want you guys to succeed. But to succeed, you must admit that you have issues and fix them.
@Roxx @Shadow_Fox Please, pass this to a project management team.