Having being lead production on two groups this year I have had to hold and run a few play test sessions and find ways to get groups to report those bugs they find. Both groups were run in different circumstances, so required a different approach, but both helped me come to a new form and way of reporting and dealing with bugs.

Bug Category

During my research to adding more production into a Games Jam team I found a few articles about keeping bug reporting simple and not over complicating things. So my idea was to have 3 colored bug categories, each of these types of bug would be dealt with in a different way.

RED – Game Breaking Issues

These issues are the ones that effect your game play and if left ruin your game. They are expected to be dealt with straight away and take priority over any new features planned to for that sprint.

Orange – Serious Issues

These issues are irritating, but don’t completely ruin the gameplay. You deal with these issues at some point during the next sprint.

Green – Minor Issues

These can be fixed at any point in the remaining time. It could be when someone is waiting to access to a certain part of the master file they can quickly fix a few issues while they wait.

Bug Reporting Form

Over the course of the year with the Collaborative Group at University I had to keep making iterations of forms and tried different ways to encourage the team to report the bugs they made. The issues I had included:

• Half the team not bothering to report a bug
• Not reporting everything, thinking small bugs others will pick up
• People not testing all of the areas of the game
• Adding all bugs onto one form entry
• Not noting down where the bug happened or all conditions to make it happen

Later as I had put all bugs up on Trello on their own individual cards for the techs to go over and fix the issues. I wanted testers to go back and make sure these bugs had now been resolved and then move them into Resolved or Still Buggy lists. The issue here is if those testing do not update the card it causes issues tracking things later on.

So I ended up going back to a google form to collect all the bugs but i rejigged the questions and added a few more hoping to cover the issues before. Some of the key changes I made were

1. Adding a drop down with everyone’s names so I can see who is reporting
2. Breaking down the questions regarding what the bug is to a few questions like where the bug happened, what actually happened and what was supposed to happen.
3. Ask how they think the issue should be fixed, to make them think about the bug in a different way
4. Ask if they can make the bug happen more then once, this is so they test the issues more than once.
5. Also ask them what kind of grade they think the bug is (Red, Orange or Green)

The thing about bug forms is they can be totally unique to your game that your testing, but if you want a base to work from here is one I set up for my group to use that you can look at – Click Here