Maggie Gourlay - Ignite - My Gaming Days Weren’t Wasted: How Gaming Trained Me for Testing in DevOps

Transcript

2. My Gaming Days Weren’t Wasted: How Gaming Trained Me for Testing DevOps By Margaret Gourlay okterok@gmail.com
3. Short intro After spending the late 90’s being a sysadmin, I began testing video games at EA Sports Tiburon in Orlando, FL. After a brief time off to get a degree in Theoretical Mathematics, I’ve returned to the QA scene and currently test VictorOps service.
4. Video games & systems administration?
5. Similar because... Both involve computers and sometimes large-scale battles. And both are more enjoyable with better hardware (and weapons).
6. Gaming systems Game developers often choose to support the newest and best hardware.
7. Hardware choice Typical gaming battlestation We hand-pick the best hardware set-up for optimal user enjoyment.
8. Hardware choice Typical DevOps battlestation And we would do the same at work, if we could.
9. Then there’s the reality Sometimes work is done on devices like these: And sometimes work is more like this:
10. Expectation vs Reality So when building and maintaining SAAS, we have to support a wide variety of platforms.
11. But sometimes you have to share Your battlestation with coworkers
12. Friends vs Coworkers People share games with other people too. Sometimes lots of them. Sometimes in the same room, sometimes far away.
13. Friends vs Coworkers DevOps tools are shared among coworkers. Sometimes lots of them. Sometimes in the same room, sometimes far away.
14. Fighting a fire is like raiding And if teamwork falls apart, things go badly.
15. Good communication is key In both cases, though the tools are different.
16. But bugs can ruin the whole thing But in games, when bugs occur they rant on anonymous forums. If the bugs are bad enough, they ditch it forever.
17. DevOps bugs And when bugs occur in software, users create support tickets. Sometimes late at night. After a long night of battling demons. But sometimes we get another chance, so QA is very important.
18. Why it helps to understand gamers DevOps professionals and gamers also have a lot in common regarding what’s required to do our jobs effectively.
19. Where testing differs... Ultimately, the biggest difference is that bugs in SAAS can be much worse and cause much more damage.
20. What can we learn? By understanding the needs of our audience, as well as how they work, play and communicate, we can strategically find bugs.
21. To sum up To sum up, working on games drives much discovery into working on software to help us all be victorious. okterok@gmail.com