Game tester/QA jobs

A friend of mine has a part-time QA job at Infogrames Melbourne House

what is qualification for game tester ? do you need background for programing ?

Programming experience is not neccessary for QA positions.
From what i've read/heard about QA positions, the most desirable qualities are:
- Team work!
- Played hundreds of games, knows exactly why a certain game is good or bad AND could suggest ways to improve the game.
- Has a reasonable amount of technical knowledge as far as the hardware that the games are running on is concerned. This means the tester can make reasonable suggestions/test for things that may be specific to certain hardware etc.
- Good communications skills. The tester must be able to very clearly identify any problems to the development team.
- Good general debugging skills. Take note of everything you do, so that when you do find a problem, you can write down exactly how to reproduce that problem. (Knowing the hardware also helps here.)
- Can play the same bit of the same level of the same game hundreds of times without losing concentration. The idea here is for the tester to treat the job as a "job" rather than just getting to play games all day.

In some instances, QA guys are more like designers than anything else. As well as testing a game for technical bugs, it is also their job to find flaws in the gameplay. This means you play games a lot and know exactly how to break gameplay. Testers should also be able to suggest how to fix design flaws.

I believe Microforte have a QA team.

CYer, Blitz

what are the age restrictions to be a tester

The legal working age (around 15 or so in most of australia?) however, there may be restrictions if you need to sign a legal contract (such as NDA), and most companies probably won't hire anyone under 18 simply because they may not be mature and reliable enough to work well as part of a team. Companies don't want to babysit people.
You never know if you don't ask (the companies) though.
CYer, Blitz

Do companies normally advertise these positions? Or is it one that you have to approach them for individually?

Out of the year and a half that Sumea's been up, I've only noticed one ad for a QA job, and that was posted by Finger (** oh, and the Senior QA position by THQ Australia [:)]). Definately should approach them first if you're after a QA job.

Yet another question (sorry guys!): What are the chances of landing a QA job? I have considerable prior experience is testing (for business applications though) and coding, but will this count. I also imagine that the companies can pick and choose, with there being a large amount of competiveness for the jobs.

Just a side note and slightly O/T from the original post, many of the people I've dealt with here and overseas (both producers and executive producers) have a background in QA, and they're all earning very good money now.... it'd definitely seems to be a great place to start if you want to work your way up the corporate ladder in game development, especially if you have good leadership skills.

*makes mental note to answer all these questions when he has time later*