BioWare and Riot Games join GDC 2013 first QA Summit

BioWare and Riot Games will feature in the first ever GDC QA Summit scheduled to debut during next year's GDC 2013 conference, GDC organizers have revealed.

The upcoming summit includes discussions regarding quality assurance testing in games development, with a focus on "new and/or current tools, processes and organization methods being used in QA today and to show how QA is an integral part of development." Advisors to the QA summit include Double Fine's Daniel Pangelina, EA's Mario Vasquez, and VMC Game Labs' Ben Wibberley.

Joining the 2013 summit are BioWare's Tulay Tetiker McNally and Arone Le Bray who will look into the relationship between QA and Development teams in "BioWare QA - Partners in Development (Embed Model)." The talk aims to demonstrate BioWare's QA model and its application to the development of narrative in Mass Effect 3.

Also joining is Benjamin Seifert of Riot Games, the studio behind League of Legends, to detail the methods used by the studio's QA team to tackle the regular delivery of new content into the game in "It's Raining New Content: Successful Rapid Test Iterations."

Finally, Linda Lemieux of VMC Game Labs, Brian Buhr of Sony Computer Entertainment America, and Steve Fowler of The Walt Disney Company will look at QA automation in "Automation in the Technically Challenging World of Game Development." This will explore the various challenges surrounding automation and ways to address those issues.

The new summit takes place on March 25 and March 26, 2013 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. GDC 2013 runs from March 25 to March 29. The first panels were announced in March and can be viewed here.