Lifecycle Of A FIFA Issue - Part 1

Dec 7, 2020

This series details the phases that a FIFA 21 Issue normally goes through before it can be fixed.

Hey FIFA Fans.

My name is Joel Doonan, and I am the lead Producer for the Player First Operations team, part of the FIFA Live team.

Almost everyone has run into a bug or issue at some point when playing a video game, and a fair number of you have probably tried to report those issues to the development team on forums, or through social media, and probably wondered why some of those issues are not immediately resolved.

With the recent launch of the EA SPORTS FIFA (EASF) Tracker, where we are surfacing some of the community reported issues that the FIFA Development Team is investigating, we thought this would be a great opportunity to pull back the curtain on what goes into fixing an issue in a live FIFA game.

This will be the first in a series of Pitch Notes articles focused on a deep dive into the lifecycle of the average issue in FIFA 21.

In this series, I cover the various steps that an issue generally needs to go through in order to be addressed and released in the live version of FIFA 21.

This 4 part series covers:

• Part 1 - Identification (This article)
• Part 2 - Investigation
• Part 3 - Resolution
• Part 4 - Release

For this article, we are going to be covering the Identification phase, where potential issues are found and tracked in order to facilitate the other phases of the life-cycle.

One note before we start, I will be using some technical terms at times, but when I am using a term that may not be clear to those that are not familiar with game development, there will be a footnote that explains what that term means. So let’s dive right in and look into how issues get identified.

Identification Of An Issue

The FIFA 21 team identifies potential issues through a variety of sources.

We have a team of Quality Verification analysts¹ (Live QV) that work around the clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every single day of the year, who are constantly playing and testing the game, to confirm that things are working correctly. Often they are the first source of internal information about an issue, either directly from their own interaction with the game, or because another key part of their job is gathering potential issue information from various sources so that they can be tracked and prepared for eventual investigation by the FIFA Development Team.

One key source of potential issues is the various community sites for FIFA. While our Live QV team does spend time in a variety of FIFA community sites, the two most commonly used places to gather information on issues are Answers HQ for FIFA 21 and the Official FIFA 21 Forums.

When looking for issues on FIFA community sites that they want to start to track, the Live QV team are looking for issues that come with enough information to help make them reproducible², as that is one of the keys to being able to actually figure out what may be going on, and allow for potential resolution of an issue downstream.

The types of information that they are looking for are:

• Detailed descriptions of what happened, both when the issue occurred, but also before the issue happened and afterwards.
  • Often, the cause of an issue is because of something that was done in the lead up to when the issue was actually seen by a player, not at the exact time that the issue itself was seen.
    • As a hypothetical example, you could have a crash when loading into a match in Career Mode, but the reason for the crash could be because of a player injury that happened in the previous match causing some sort of data corruption issue.
• Information on whether this is happening all the time, was just seen once, etc.
• Visual examples of the issue happening, such as a video of the issue, or screenshots.

A good example of the information that is ideal for an issue can be found when you try to start a New Topic on the Bug Reports section of Answers HQ. If you are providing accurate and detailed answers to all of these questions when you are trying to report an issue, it’s likely that you are giving the Live QV team the information that they need to start tracking that issue on their end.

Below you can see the types of questions that are being asked when you try to submit an issue in that space.

Live QV isn’t just getting reports of issues from external sites though. Through our internal channels, EA employees who are engaging with FIFA are also reporting issues that they find, either through their own experience or from what they see on social media or community sites, to our Live QV team to start to track, providing the same sort of information that is detailed above.

Live QV is also getting reports from the help.ea.com team, about what issues players are contacting our Customer Experience (CE) teams about.

Lastly, our Community Teams, the team that our community managers work on, are also sending reports to Live QV about what issues players are reporting on social channels or other community sites.

All this to say that there are many different avenues for an issue to originate from, but they all eventually lead to our Live QV team so that they can ensure that we have a standardized way of tracking reported FIFA 21 issues.

Once Live QV has enough information about an issue to allow them to start to track it, they will enter that issue into our bug tracking database³. At this point they will start attempting to reproduce the issue. This is a key step in the issue life-cycle, as an issue that cannot be reproduced consistently is much more difficult to resolve than one that can be.

Taking the information they have available, they will start to try to reproduce the issue, starting first with the exact information that they were given, and if that does not result in the issue that was reported, starting to test various other methods of trying to produce the same symptoms.

An important point to call out here is that just because someone is able to reproduce an issue consistently themselves, does not mean that others will be able to reproduce it in the same way. An issue can be caused by any number of different reasons, some of which are outside of the direct control or visibility of the player, such as save data, what their online opponent is doing or other ‘under the hood’ things that could be at play.

If Live QV are able to consistently reproduce the issue, they update the issue in the bug tracking database with the key information they identified about it. At this point the issue is now at the attention of the FIFA Live Team, who will start to include that issue in prioritization discussions about which issues should be assigned to a software engineer⁴ (SE), something that we will cover in more detail in Part 2 of this series.

If Live QV is not able to consistently reproduce the issue, they will start to work with our CE and Community teams in an attempt to get more information from players that are reporting it, such as more detailed reproduction information or more examples of videos which may help to identify some information that is missing and hindering the reproduction of the issue.

In some cases, getting specific time information for when an issue occurred will allow for the gathering of error logs⁵, which, even if our Live QV is unable to reproduce the issue, can provide detailed information that will allow for an SE to investigate the issue when it is assigned to them.

All in all, for an issue to officially be deemed as ready to leave the Identification phase, the issue needs to be actionable in some way by the Development Team, either because Live QV has identified ways to consistently reproduce the issue, or because they have provided other supplemental information that will enable an SE to effectively investigate the issue that has been reported.

In the next article in this series, we will look at the next phase in the life-cycle of the average FIFA 21 issue, which is the Investigation phase.

How Can We (The Players) Help?

As this article specifically covers the Identification phase of the cycle, I wanted to take a minute to speak to how you, the FIFA player, can help with this phase.

As covered above, our Live QV Team is constantly seeking out information from players regarding issues they may be seeing so they can capture the information and start to track it.

When you see something that you believe is an issue, the best thing you can do to help us potentially resolve that issue is to report it to us, and the best place to do that is on AnswersHQ by submitting a bug report.

When you do so, providing as much information as possible is key to helping Live QV to understand and hopefully reproduce the issue. Providing examples, such as screenshots or videos is also extremely helpful.

Thanks for taking time to read this article, and I hope that this series will provide some greater insight into what goes into fixing issues that you may have seen while playing a video game.

Joel Doonan and the FIFA Live Team.

Footnotes

¹: A Live Quality Verification Analyst is a member of our quality verification team, or Live Monitoring Testing team. They are constantly in the game, sometimes playing the game like your average player would, but also running very focused tests to validate and/or attempt to break different parts of the game. Their primary job is to find, track and report issues within the game.

²: When an issue is reproducible, it means that we can actually consistently make the issue happen ourselves when following a set of steps. If an issue is 100% reproducible, it means we can make it happen all the time. Many issues are not 100% reproducible, and how easy an issue can be reproduced is one of the key factors that goes into the prioritization decision around which issues to investigate, and to hopefully, resolve.

³: A bug tracking database is a place where all the known issues about a game are kept, along with the details around how to reproduce them, screenshots or videos of the issues and any other important information.

⁴: A software engineer, or SE, is someone who writes the code that makes the game actually work. There are many different kinds of software engineers, as different types of coding work requires different skills. For example, doing coding work for server code is different than doing coding work for gameplay.

⁵: Sometimes, when an issue occurs, there will be an error generated in the data that is created when you are playing the game. That error could be somewhere in potentially hundreds of thousands of lines of data, so in order to find it, knowing exactly what time an issue occurred can help narrow down where to look in the data for the information. A software engineer reviewing that error can often help identify why an issue is happening, and it is especially useful for issues that cannot be reproduced by our team consistently.

For more deep dives on FIFA from members of the game team, check out the Pitch Notes Page.

Please Note: This article is describing in general terms what the Dev Teams are working on. We are constantly looking to improve the FIFA experience for everyone, so this article may become outdated as we make adjustments to keep our game fun for everyone.

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