I’m Mod Asherz, Technical Content Developer for Runescape. I work within the RS-DoS team who are currently working on the Seren Quest and Elf City Waterfall. You may know my name from certain updates like Seasonal Hiscore’s, Minigame Spotlight and the Well of Goodwill, just to name a few. My working week isn’t as exciting as most you have seen so far but I’ll try and give a decent insight into what I get up to on a Monday!
Most days, I’m getting in around 8am. I’ll get settled, start up my computer and make sure my local code base is up to date. This is soon followed by our teams’ morning stand up, where we keep each other briefed of what we’ll be up to during the day. This helps to avoid nasty surprises when someone stands over your shoulder staring at your screen and asking, “what are you doing?”.
Monday is Game Update day, so I will update all of my code to be in line with what is Live, then give it a quick test to make sure I haven’t broken anything too badly. I’ll scan over the forums for part of the day to check out what players have said about the update and if there is anything that needs to be changed.
As it is update day we get most of the QA team on Live monitoring, which means they check over the bugs that get sent in from players and are busy testing, checking to see if they’re legitimate bugs. They also scan the forums and social for any issues players are raising. If any issues have been found with content that I created, either that update or from previous content, I’ll receive a job saying there is a bug in a piece of my work.
This week in particular, I received one such bug. As it’s an issue with the recent update, I get on it right away to make sure it doesn’t cause any horrendous issues with player’s accounts, given that everyone’s playing at the moment. Thankfully, QA have put fantastic reproduction steps on the job, so I find the exact cause of the issue in code.
Once I’ve fixed the problem I give it a quick test to make sure the issue at hand is resolved. I will then send the job back to QA who will give it a more robust test; if there’s still an issue then it will come back to me to double check and fix again. This happens over and over again until QA are happy it has been fully resolved. Once QA are happy with it, it will get marked as “Awaiting Copy”. Once in this state our Upload Manager (Mod Easty) will move it to our Release Candidate.
At this point a second pair of QA eyes (our Release team) will give it another test to make sure it is actually fixed - as players do things differently, something else might still be broken that the first QA guys may have missed. If there is, it will come back to me once again and the same fix and send back cycle will happen until they are happy. Once everyone is convinced it’s been resolved in the Release Candidate, it is ready to go live.
The rest of the day is then cracking on with the work I told everyone I was going to do at our team stand up. As a technical developer and curator of some of our in-house tools, there may be some cases where I deviate from my work, due to someone having an issue with our tool set, or maybe one of our core systems has fallen over, meaning no one can actually work. When this happens I will go and kick up a fuss in our IT department. This is something I am generally good at and the IT team are really good at resolving the issue, so that everyone can get back to work faster.
Most days, I’m getting in around 8am. I’ll get settled, start up my computer and make sure my local code base is up to date. This is soon followed by our teams’ morning stand up, where we keep each other briefed of what we’ll be up to during the day. This helps to avoid nasty surprises when someone stands over your shoulder staring at your screen and asking, “what are you doing?”.
Monday is Game Update day, so I will update all of my code to be in line with what is Live, then give it a quick test to make sure I haven’t broken anything too badly. I’ll scan over the forums for part of the day to check out what players have said about the update and if there is anything that needs to be changed.
As it is update day we get most of the QA team on Live monitoring, which means they check over the bugs that get sent in from players and are busy testing, checking to see if they’re legitimate bugs. They also scan the forums and social for any issues players are raising. If any issues have been found with content that I created, either that update or from previous content, I’ll receive a job saying there is a bug in a piece of my work.
This week in particular, I received one such bug. As it’s an issue with the recent update, I get on it right away to make sure it doesn’t cause any horrendous issues with player’s accounts, given that everyone’s playing at the moment. Thankfully, QA have put fantastic reproduction steps on the job, so I find the exact cause of the issue in code.
Once I’ve fixed the problem I give it a quick test to make sure the issue at hand is resolved. I will then send the job back to QA who will give it a more robust test; if there’s still an issue then it will come back to me to double check and fix again. This happens over and over again until QA are happy it has been fully resolved. Once QA are happy with it, it will get marked as “Awaiting Copy”. Once in this state our Upload Manager (Mod Easty) will move it to our Release Candidate.
At this point a second pair of QA eyes (our Release team) will give it another test to make sure it is actually fixed - as players do things differently, something else might still be broken that the first QA guys may have missed. If there is, it will come back to me once again and the same fix and send back cycle will happen until they are happy. Once everyone is convinced it’s been resolved in the Release Candidate, it is ready to go live.
The rest of the day is then cracking on with the work I told everyone I was going to do at our team stand up. As a technical developer and curator of some of our in-house tools, there may be some cases where I deviate from my work, due to someone having an issue with our tool set, or maybe one of our core systems has fallen over, meaning no one can actually work. When this happens I will go and kick up a fuss in our IT department. This is something I am generally good at and the IT team are really good at resolving the issue, so that everyone can get back to work faster.
Mod Asherz
I am Death the myth and the legend!
13-Jul-2015 10:24:04
