Full Web Testing for the 3D World

Solarflare Studio is a creative technology studio with a mission to connect people through innovative solutions and imaginative experiences. The company designs these experiences from start to finish. A list of solutions Solarflare can offer its clients includes but is not limited to data visualization, virtual events, AR environments, educational environments, and social metaverse projects.

The studio has designed a virtual 3D world dedicated to a major sports event, where users can create avatars, walk around, complete missions resembling minigames, add friends, and participate in different activities.

Before releasing the 3D world to the live environment, the client wanted to run its full testing. The request itself was typical, but the project wasn’t ordinary. To be more specific:

• The 3D world has been developed from scratch. Being fully custom, it lacked comprehensive documentation. QA engineers were to work only with designs in Figma.
• The project was complex, but the deadlines were tight. The release was planned for the start date of the event, so it wasn’t possible to shift the deadline or reschedule the release date.
• The development proceeded in parallel to testing and in the same environment. Such an approach complicates the testing and can affect its effectiveness.

We agreed on working by estimate: our team calculated the number of hours, amount of people to involve, and the total cost based on work scope and other requirements. QA engineers suggested running functional and UI testing for the game layer & web layer of the project, and Solarflare Studio approved it.

Deadlines

To meet the announced deadlines, it was significant to:

1. involve in testing as many experts as possible;
2. assign experienced QA specialists due to the custom nature of the project and a lack of documentation.

The already mentioned simultaneous development and testing in the same environment also were a result of the tight deadlines. To maximize the efficiency of the testing effort, the QA specialists:

• started creating checklists in advance and updated them as the requirements or design changed;
• managed the statuses of the logged defects to monitor the debugging process, though usually, QA specialists don’t do this if a single round of testing is planned.

Working process

1. We started with prioritizing the functionality for testing. The completed and stable functionality was to be examined in the first instance.
2. New features were added to the checklist as soon as they were introduced and then tested according to the set priorities.
3. The bugs already logged and fixed or not reproducible received the new statuses.
4. Whenever the design files were insufficient for understanding the requirements, the QA engineers reached out to the client for clarification or made decisions regarding particular features relying on their experience.