An Evolution of Quality Practices: Changing the Testing Model in a Game Company

Topic: An Evolution of Quality Practices: Changing the Testing Model in a Game Company

Electronic Arts is the producer of the world's best sports games including FIFA, NHL and Madden. One of the largest challenges they face is in how to effectively test games that allow such a high degree of player interaction with the system and other players. The traditional "butts in seats, controllers in hand" approach had been successful for a number of years, but the constant evolution of the game features required a massive increase in manual testers to test new features. Over the past number of years the focus has shifted from the purely traditional approach to one that employs an engineering team focused not just on assisting with test verification, but that works to limit defect creation by development.

Our talk is going to explore the history of manual testing by a focused Quality Assurance team at EA, and the transition to including a Quality Engineering team into the mix. We will talk about how the QA and QE teams work together now, and also how we are continuing to evolve.

Speakers:

Ravi Minhas is a Senior Quality Assurance Manager at Electronic Arts (EA) working in the QA department and assigned to FIFA projects.

Ravi started his career in Quality Assurance as a black box tester in 2003 and has been in QA at EA for 13 years and counting. In 2005 he moved out of the individual contributor space and into management, eventually working his way up to being a Sr QA Manager within the FIFA product portfolio. Ravi has worked on multiple projects and teams, including; NBA Live, Skate and FIFA projects. He has also managed and helped with the creation of QA teams at multiple offsite locations.

You can find him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravi-minhas-ab6b6519

Sean Wilson is a Development Director at Electronic Arts working in the Quality Engineering department and focused on such great titles as FIFA, NHL and UFC.

After starting in the manual test space, Sean quickly moved over to a more technical track as an automation tester, DBA and white box tester, all while picking up some training and experience in core development. In 2004 he moved out of the individual contributor space and into management roles, eventually working his way up to being a Director of Quality Assurance in 2013.

Seeing a gap in how the Agile methodology was implemented in software projects, Sean decided move away from QA in 2014 in order to focus on Project and Program Management. This move opened up the opportunity that landed him at EA as a Development Director in 2015.

Sean is a keen follower of the evolution of Agile development and test methodologies and an irregular contributor in local test groups and on LinkedIn.
Outside of work you can find Sean swimming, biking or running somewhere around the lower mainland when he isn't spending time with his family.

You can find him at: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jseanwilson

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