Advice for the only tester on a game project

Today, I would like to talk about the situation when you are the first QA on a new (or not so new) project. Here, I've gathered some advice on what to consider and pay attention to in such a situation.

So, let's imagine you're a tester and you find yourself in a situation where you need to help bring the project to its first release. Before diving into testing, writing test documentation, and setting up processes, you need to prepare.

What do we need to do to start?

1. Determine the release deadlines, at least approximately. This will help us understand how much time we have for all our activities and what we can fit into those deadlines, as well as what we definitely won't have time for.
2. Familiarize yourself with the project. You could do this before the first step, or simultaneously. It's important to understand the game's main value, its features, core gameplay, and player progression.
3. Find out and compile a list of the main features that must be tested for release - these will likely include elements of the core gameplay, progression, etc.
4. Determine the amount of game content planned for release - this could be a week, a month, or more. Again, this will affect the list of features mentioned above.
5. Find out what activities they expect from you: is it just game testing or perhaps also analytics testing, release management, documentation writing, process optimization, etc. All of this will affect deadlines and your workload. Remember that we're not robots (at least, most of us aren't), and we can't always complete all the activities expected of us.
6. Of course, find out on which platforms we plan to release. It could be only mobile devices, or only PC, or possibly all together - a simultaneous release. Here, it's probably worth agreeing to stagger the release dates on different platforms.
7. Find out the minimum and recommended device requirements for the game - this will give us an idea of what we need to test on and allow us to prepare and conduct at least minimal performance testing. There may be some issues that arise here.
8. Find out the team's toolkit - our greatest interest will be in the game engine and various third-party tools like analytics or similar. Because if there's suddenly a complex tool on the project that you're not familiar with, you'll need to allocate additional time to learn it. Here, I deliberately didn't mention bug tracking systems or anything similar, as they're usually quite similar.
9. Actually start testing. Roughly understand your pace of testing tasks because it can vary from project to project, including depending on the genre or platform.

Of course, these are not all the tips, and certainly not a comprehensive guide, but it will give you an idea and a rough understanding of where to start and help you not miss any points.