Publishing Games - Building JavaScript Games for Phones, Tablets, and Desktop - page 380

When you've more or less finished writing the code, there are two other major stages in testing:
alpha and beta testing . Alpha testing is done internally by a group of people, often the developers
themselves. Alpha testing is important because it makes sure all the components the developers
have built work together as they should. After the internal alpha testing, software can also be tested
externally. This is called beta testing: the software is used by a panel of external users. Often, beta
testing is useful not only to remove bugs, but also to find out whether a program works on a variety
of devices. In the case of games, beta testing also helps to verify that the gameplay is as intended,
that the tutorial levels are clear, and that levels are progressing nicely. In the game industry, this step
is called playtesting . You can do playtesting internally and externally. Regardless, don't postpone
playtesting until your game is nearly finished. Sometimes the results of playtesting can mean a
significant change in the way a game works. The earlier in the process you know this, the better.
Mark Overmars: “It is important to separate the various testing stages. The developers
try to test their code while they are writing it, but they will not able to do that for all
devices and all platforms. Our game designer gets an early version of the game fairly
soon and can then start doing level design and gameplay testing. These tests are
also done by other people in the company (but not the developers, generally). Once
we think the game is finished, we put the game online, but hidden from the public.
We then test the game on all possible devices and platforms. We first test whether
all the aspects of the game itself are working as they should, which is something we
don't have to check on all the devices. Second, we let a lot of different people try
out the game on different devices and platforms, where we let them go through a
basic checklist to verify that audio is working properly, the screens work, the fonts
are visible, and so on. If we discover major issues in the game at that point, we pull
it offline, and we go through the whole process from the start again.
If everything works out, the game is sent to an external test panel that focuses more
on gameplay. We'd like to extend and improve this process more in the future.
In the past, we have also hired an external party to do extensive testing on all kinds of
different devices and platforms. The main goal in that case was to extensively test our
engine. Probably we are going to do this again soon, because a lot of useful things
came out of that. On the other hand, it also made us realize that our engine was
actually working pretty well, which is a nice thing to know. We do have a bunch of
different devices and browsers available at our company, but it is impossible to have
everything. And the frustrating thing is that—if you look at Android, for example—your
game may work on Android 4.0 and 4.2, but not on Android 4.1. Unfortunately, there
is no order to how well everything is working.”
Even more so than with other programming languages, it's important that your code is well-written
when you write JavaScript code. Debugging and testing JavaScript code is harder than regular
applications because so many variables are involved. Therefore, it's crucial that your code is working
well before you let it run on a variety of devices. And because JavaScript allows for loose typing,
many code-editing environments have trouble doing automatic code completion very effectively,
which is a pity because a code-completion feature in your code editor can save you a lot of time—not
so much typing time as time you don't have to spend browsing through online help to find how that
method that you want to use is spelled and what parameters it needs.