Crossing Industry Boundaries at GDC 2013
The GDC( Game Developers Conference – http://www.gdconf.com ) has made its way to San Francisco once again this year and I’m glad to report that I had the opportunity to attend, sponsored by Zoosk. Why would Zoosk be interested in GDC you ask? At Zoosk, we make it a goal to get to know the various platforms and hardware that we target for our client applications and we’re not afraid to cross industry boundaries to accomplish this. We develop each of our client applications using the platform’s preferred language(s): Objective C for iOS, Java for Android, and Web technologies for our Web applications. This approach allows us to leverage each platform’s strengths and tools to produce high quality applications that meet established expectations for each target platform. At GDC, we are able to see what other software developers can accomplish with these same technologies, in addition to getting a sneak peak at what will be possible in the near future.
One of the sessions I attended was titled “Automation in the Technically Challenging World of Game Development”, where an hour long panel discussion ensued between notable QA staff from various companies such as VMC Game Labs, Sony Computer Entertainment America, LocalizeDirect, Disney Interactive, Atari inc., and The Walt Disney Company. One key point was the importance of a tightly coupled working relationship between the Engineering and QA teams. Some of the participants even commented on the value of QA staff having the ability to understand and write code, if necessary. Another key point was the growing need for Automation testing and knowing when to manually test versus when to automate a test case. I was proud of our QA team at Zoosk for already demonstrating previous knowledge of these key points by having implemented their own QA/Engineer cross-training program in addition to having contributed to the Appium( http://appium.io ) open source test automation tool in its early stages.
In Conclusion, attending GDC was a motivating learning experience that I would recommend to anyone interested in cutting-edge software development practices in any industry!
