Does behind the scenes confirm the lack of a QA team?

Recently when Sony released the PlayStation E3 Booth space, they also released yet another video regarding the upcoming playground space. In the video, there were several members of the development team talking about the upcoming space and discussing the development process. I'm personally glad to see this, as it is something that had been suggested before, but there was something interesting I noticed about the video.



Approximately two minutes into the video, Adrian, who is apparently the senior software engineer for Home discusses the game of chess that will be in the space. He then goes on to say that because it is a multiplayer game, he has to use two consoles himself to test it. What is interesting about that statement? Well, a few things.

First and foremost, judging by this video and this statement alone we can see a major problem - there appears to be no QA team. You see, when developing software, there is usually a team dedicated to testing it before it goes live. This is called quality assurance. It is there to ensure quality so we do not end up with what Home is - essentially a buggy mess. I have theorized for a long time that the Home team is severely understaffed, and that there couldn't possibly be a QA team due to the high number of bugs we often see.

Granted, a QA team cannot catch everything, that is theoretically impossible, but it is their job to ensure that things such as the infamous 1.36 bug (which, as far as I know, still persists). If this video confirms my theory, it could explain the amount of bugs we see on a regular basis. However, that does not make it acceptable. We're dealing with a service that is used by millions (according to Sony), owned and maintained by a Fortune 500 company, and is mostly profit.

Well I'm not willing to make a further investment when little (if any) of the money earned goes back into the service. I know, Sony is a business, there are licensing fees, the cost of running the servers and more, but we know nothing about what goes on behind closed doors. What I do know however, and anyone who uses and has used Home knows, is that more of their efforts go toward content as opposed to improving the service and keeping the community satisfied with it. After all, there's no profit in free core client updates, even if they do charge us ten dollars for a hovercraft.

Here's a tip Sony;

Get a QA team. Maybe then you wouldn't have bugs that compromise data and piss everyone off.