The other day I was speaking with our playtest group about how I determine the severity of an issue and it led into me talking a bit about two of the things I feel it is important for people newer to QA to learn and internalize.

Learning that the way you play games isn't the way everyone else plays games. While my style of play might bring out a bug, maybe only a player like me will encounter it. When determining how bad an issue is I have to take that into account.

But a lot of that is subjective. Typically I look at if this is something that happens on the "golden path" or if it was something I had to seek out. If it happens on the path all players are likely to be on, then I know more players will see it.

Happens off the beaten path or is because I was doing something weird most people won't do, it lowers how many people are going to encounter the issue. This also bleeds into "tester bugs" things that no one but a tester is going to do, like jump in one spot 150 times and crouch

which causes you to fall through the ground. How many people are going to do that. It takes a while I think to be able to think like that and really internalize that your experience is not everyone else's experience. Not every one is going to play like you and

and it is important to remember that fact.

The other thing is learning to not get too attached to your bugs. The realities of development are sometimes things just aren't as bad as you think and maybe fixing that bug will cause something even worse.

Or that thing that may appear to be a simple fix is in fact not a simple fix and there just isn't time to try and fix that issue because doing so might be a lot more work than it is worth.

I think it is great to evangelize for fixing an issue you really believe should be fixed

but you should also try to understand why the issue is not being fixed at this time. Talk with the dev and have them explain it to you, or if a producer or lead has waived it, try to understand why that was waived.

A lot of the time it is because something more pressing needs to be fixed and your bug is going to be fixed in a patch later on. On the rare occasions that someone doesn't understand how bad the bug is, that is the time to evangelize for it.

Learn to let go of issues though, because a lot of issues you may write might not get fixed and that is just the reality of it and it isn't because no one cares.

These two things, were probably the most important lessons I learned and internalized in my first year of QA.