Someone in the test industry here. I had a stint in the games industry, as well.
An army of QA is... problematic. Inevitably it turns into a death march, which is a huge waste. Worse, developers feel much less inclined to own the quality of their code (consciously or unconsciously) because "QA will catch it." I suspect that even if you wanted to be more rigorous, the incentives are against you.
Fixing bugs filed by QA is also expensive, relative to fixing the code before it's checked in. By the time a bug makes it to QA, it's a ton of patches later, the developer is working on another feature, and it's not at all obvious which patch introduced the bug. The most expedient strategy of "revert the culprit" is difficult if not impossible, and checking in new code for a fix introduces further risk.
There's certainly something to be said for expert/exploratory testing. Hell, it puts food on my table. :) But as a tester, I'm far less inclined to work on a product where developers aren't concerned about code correctness or quality even at a micro level. It says to me that they don't value my time.
Then again, I suppose in the games industry it matters less what QA thinks, given that the people actually doing the testing are often temporary/contract employees.
An army of QA is... problematic. Inevitably it turns into a death march, which is a huge waste. Worse, developers feel much less inclined to own the quality of their code (consciously or unconsciously) because "QA will catch it." I suspect that even if you wanted to be more rigorous, the incentives are against you.
Fixing bugs filed by QA is also expensive, relative to fixing the code before it's checked in. By the time a bug makes it to QA, it's a ton of patches later, the developer is working on another feature, and it's not at all obvious which patch introduced the bug. The most expedient strategy of "revert the culprit" is difficult if not impossible, and checking in new code for a fix introduces further risk.
There's certainly something to be said for expert/exploratory testing. Hell, it puts food on my table. :) But as a tester, I'm far less inclined to work on a product where developers aren't concerned about code correctness or quality even at a micro level. It says to me that they don't value my time.
Then again, I suppose in the games industry it matters less what QA thinks, given that the people actually doing the testing are often temporary/contract employees.