testing
15 articles
-
Rebalancing a Live Game: How I Broke Veteran Players Twice and Why the Test Was Green
I reworked the balance of my idle game, and a player with a maxed-out tower died on wave one. I shipped a fix with a test, and the same player wrote: "I have millions of HP but can't kill a single enemy." The test was green because it checked the wave number, not kills. A first-person breakdown: why a rebalance is a data migration, which saves to test with, and how to check the outcome instead of a proxy.
-
A Checklist for Testing Dates, Time and Time Zones
Dates are a source of bugs that surface in production six months later. A practical checklist: storing in UTC, time zones, daylight saving (DST), date formats, boundaries (midnight, end of month, Feb 29), calculations across DST, relative time, and how to reproduce it all.
-
Ariane 5, Flight 501: How One Overflow Blew Up a Rocket in 40 Seconds
On 4 June 1996, the first Ariane 5 self-destructed 37 seconds after launch. The cause: an overflow converting a 64-bit float to a 16-bit int in reused Ariane 4 code. A first-person breakdown: what happened, why redundancy didn't help, and six QA lessons on code reuse, boundaries, dead functionality, error handling, and testing in the real configuration.
-
API Test Automation: Where to Start and What to Cover in 2026
API tests are the base of the pyramid: faster and more stable than UI, catching logic bugs earlier and cheaper. A first-person take: what to check beyond 200 (schema, error paths, authorization, boundaries, idempotency), data setup/teardown and isolation, validating the contract against OpenAPI/JSON Schema, and the 2026 toolset (Playwright request, pytest+httpx, REST Assured, Hurl, Schemathesis). With a good-API-test checklist.
-
AI bots that play your game: game-QA automation in 2026
AI agents for game testing: how they differ from scripted automation, what they actually do (24/7 exploratory play, crashes, balance, video logs), the limits and risks, who's on the market (modl.ai, AltTester, GameDriver), when to use AI bots and when plain automation is enough. A pilot checklist.
-
File upload testing checklist: 30+ cases people forget
A reusable file upload testing checklist: content vs extension and magic bytes, sizes and decompression bombs, file names and path traversal, the upload process and dropped connections, server-side processing and storage, security (SVG XSS, RCE, SSRF) and accessibility. 30+ points.
-
FTUE / onboarding in a mobile game: what to test in the first session
The first session (FTUE) through a QA lens: the matrix of entry points (install/reinstall/deep link/login), tutorial interruptions, skip and mandatory steps, returning player and updates, idempotent reward, A/B and funnel analytics. A 12-point checklist.
-
Testing deep links: deep links, Universal Links, App Links and the state matrix
Deep links through a QA lens: three link types, the state matrix (foreground/background/killed/not installed), deferred deep linking and attribution, fallbacks and broken links, security, AASA/assetlinks verification, tools adb/simctl/Proxyman. A 12-point checklist.
-
Mock servers for QA: WireMock and friends — when to replace a dependency with a stub
When an external dependency can't or shouldn't be run for real, you mock it. Why mock, what a good mock server does (stubs, fault injection, record/replay, verify), tools WireMock/MockServer/Mockoon/Prism/Hoverfly, mock vs Testcontainers, contract drift and Pact. A 10-point checklist.
-
Load testing: how to design it and not get garbage numbers
How to do load tests right: types (load/stress/soak/spike/breakpoint), percentiles instead of the average, open vs closed model, realistic data and traffic profile, server-side metrics and saturation, coordinated omission, tools k6/Gatling/Locust/JMeter. A 12-point checklist.
-
QA interview in 2026: how to prepare and what's actually asked
A prep map for the QA interview: theory and test-design techniques, severity vs priority, a framework for answering 'test X', bug reports, the API/SQL minimum, automation, behavioral questions via STAR, and company red flags. A 10-point checklist.
-
Test data in automated tests: a source of flakiness and coupling — and how to prepare it
Test data is one of the most invisible sources of flaky tests, bigger than locators. Isolation, determinism (freeze clock, seeded Faker), uniqueness under parallelism, factories vs fixtures vs API setup, cleanup and anonymizing prod data. A 12-point checklist.
-
Form testing checklist: 30+ cases people forget
A reusable form testing checklist: text fields and trimming, validation, numbers and money, email/phone/date/password, masks and autofill, double submit and idempotency, network, security and error accessibility. 30 points + a mini template.
-
Testing ads in a mobile game: rewarded, interstitial, mediation and edge cases
Ad monetization through a QA lens: how to test rewarded and interstitial ads, reward idempotency (SSV), no-fill, mediation and waterfall, frequency capping, ATT/GDPR consent, network and analytics. A 13-point checklist.
-
Idempotency and retry storms — what QA must test in distributed systems
The most expensive class of bugs in payments isn't 'didn't go through' — it's 'went through twice'. A QA-eye view of idempotency: Idempotency-Key, 5 typical retry scenarios, retry storms, tools (WireMock, Toxiproxy, k6), and a 13-point release checklist.