[Agentlien]

What size team do you consider typical?

Most projects I've worked on have been games where the studio was split into teams of about 6-10 people with one dedicated in-house QA member for some but not all teams, a few in-house QA workers not assigned to a specific team, plus a much larger external QA team (from the parent company/ publisher). That has worked great.

I've also been on projects with only external QA. It works, but the lack of internal QA has been a frequent annoyance.

[notmyfuture]

Yeah - in my experience 6-10 people per team is typical, often with one of them being dedicated QA. Having this, plus a separate central QA team is one way to address the pitfalls of embedded QA I was pointing out - they can cover for time away for team QA, or act as bench capacity.

[ethbr0]

IMHO, the reason embedded QA works better is because QA is fundamentally a negative task. In that you are telling people they made a mistake.

That's difficult to hear, repeatedly, from the same person. And I've seen a lot of developers not react well to the underlying discomfort.

When it's an external team, at arm's length, that relationship can get pretty bad.

At least when it's someone on your team, then you have non-QA moments and interactions to help balance out the unfortunate bug truth.

And the end result is faster, more thorough, more productive bidirectional communication between QA and coders.