QA Director at Spil Games B.V.

A relentless ambition, a strategic focus, and an unmatched level of expertise have quickly propelled SPIL GAMES to the forefront of the online casual gaming industry. Today we are shaping the future of online casual gaming.
Our websites and games are carefully targeted to specific demographics, and because they are fully localized into 19 different languages, we are empowered to truly listen to the needs and desires of players around the world.

Starting Januari 2010 I built up a steady QA/Test team with testers located in the Hilversum offices (6 engineers), Poland (1 engineer) and Ukraine (5 engineers). All QA Engineers work within the Scrum teams, as such they are part of the team and share the responsibility of testing stories which have been committed to by the team with the team.

Our work consisted of: testing all underlying services of the SOA base of the Spil Portals, testing all games coming live to site on all Spil portals and all Spil Portals and their respective CMS-es.
Automation works alongside all QA Engineers and thus alongside with all the teams. Focus is on: automating most of the new functionality, all currently existing services, and building out functional monitoring.

During my period at Spil Games we, among others, implemented “social features” across all portals:

• Login/Logout and signup
• Friends, both site specific friends and harvesting friends
• Facebook connect
• User Generated Content
• Complete redesign of one of the portal-groups
• Event system including wall-to-wall-posts, wall posts on highscores, played games, achieved awards and User Generated Content
• Optimizations to speedup the global sites with use of CSS sprites and other technologies

Methodology

The team works following practices of Rapid Software Testing and Session Testing. Using tools such as “session tester” a log of what has been tested, what was found in terms of issues, bugs and possible other things is saved to the QA wiki blog for reference and in order to keep track of what was tested when and how. Besides this User Stories have a “Test Story” field which should be used (but is not widely used) for explaining what will be tested, how will we test it and what is the expected coverage as well as what will QA need from others in order to make this testing possible.