Forza Motorsport (2023)

On Forza Motorsport, I was an embedded QA Tester on a feature team, primarily focusing on ensuring the quality of gameplay features, including Free Play, Livery Editor, Rewind, Replay, Pre-Race, and Post-Race flows. Before that, I started as a BVT and Generalist QA Tester, focusing on testing the quality of daily builds and assisting other teams with their testing efforts.

My duties and responsibilities included:

Validating PBIs and creating exit criteria tests to ensure high feature quality
Collaborating closely with cross-disciplinary team members on feature test coverage
Representing and advocating for QA in daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, and bug triages
Writing test tasks to increase QA coverage of game features and gain additional feedback
Providing valuable information regarding test coverage and bugs to developers for investigation
Leading a small group of testers in executing daily BVTs
Creating and sharing BVT results with the studio
Maintaining and expanding BVT coverage as new features are implemented
Documenting BVT processes and pipelines
Training new BVT testers on QA best practices

I worked on Forza Motorsport during its development from August 2021 to November 2022. My most significant contributions were my work as an embedded QA Tester and BVT/Generalist Tester.

Embedded QA:

One of my favorite experiences working in the games industry was being an embedded QA Tester on a feature team for Forza Motorsport. Working closely with members of production, design, and engineering within a small team gave me experience working in an agile team with a hyper-focus on specific features.

When developers added new features to test, I created exit criteria tests based on their user stories and thoroughly tested the features. There were times when I discovered bugs that failed the tests, and I worked closely with the engineers to investigate and retest the feature until it met our quality standards.

I actively represented and advocated for QA during scrum ceremonies with the feature team. From reporting day-to-day testing efforts to voicing concerns about feature quality, I always kept the player experience top of mind.

To expand test coverage of our team's features, I created test tasks for other testers to execute. This helped catch additional bugs that our team missed and collected additional feedback for features that I brought back to the team to share.

BVT (Build Verification Test) & General QA:

I initially started as a BVT and Generalist QA Tester on Forza Motorsport. I led a small team of testers in executing BVTs on the daily builds of Forza that propagated. I then created a report and sent it to the greater studio at Turn 10 to increase visibility of the overall health of the builds.

Over time, new features were added to the builds, becoming a core feature of Forza that required consistent coverage. I created new test cases for the latest features and collaborated with QA leadership and developers to implement them into the BVT process.

Additionally, during this time, I noticed a gap in our PC testing coverage. I worked closely with QA leadership and developers to add complete test suites for various PC configurations to the BVTs. After I created the test suites, we had significantly more PC coverage and were able to increase the quality of PC builds over time.

As I became the most senior member of the BVT team, I ended up training multiple QA Testers who joined the BVT team. I trained them on BVT processes and pipelines, as well as when to escalate issues and overall QA best practices. I also created training videos for new BVT Testers on how to run said processes.