An excellent idea over at The SlickEdit Developer Blog:

I’ve worked previously at several companies that didn’t have a QA department available. When the code freeze happened, all of the developers would go into QA mode. We’d then spend the next few weeks testing the features, and typically each developer would test their own. It was possibly the most feared and hated time of the year.

If you’re familiar with Quake, or pretty much any other FPS, then you know about the deathmatch. It’s my single favorite type of game and, in it’s own way, is really therapeutic when the stress of development, or testing, gets you down. A lot of the other developers I worked with at one point also loved to deathmatch and we used to play during lunch. When testing time came around, we found a way to make it fun… QA Deathmatch.

He goes on detailing the rules of QA Deathmatch. For someone who started out as a tester, this was highly entertaining, and I wished there was something like that in place when I was testing. Another idea is to have prizes for winners each week or month, giving everyone an incentive to participate and have some fun