Tag: qa

Januari 2010 – Februari 2011 – Spil Games B.V.

Martijn de Vrieze1 Comment

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.

Januari 2006 – December 2009 – eBay Inc. Marktplaats.nl

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when: Januari 2006 – Ongoing
roles: QA manager (Marktplaats.nl), Senior QA Engineer (Marktplaats.nl), In Country QA Engineer (eBay.nl)

  • Head of QA for Marktplaats.nl: As Head of Quality Assurance for Marktplaats.nl I have been responsible for extending the QA team into 3 teams: Functional team site, Functional team Admarkt and an Automation team.
    All teams are led by leads in the Netherlands where the teams themselves are located in the Ukraine.
    The QA team in total covers 15 QA Engineers dispersed over 3 different locations. Driving Test Automation to new levels by implementing Selenium Remote Control on a distributed environment with 7 automated test agents wich are responsible for over 50% of regression of the site.
    Driving the quality of work and workpace of the (offshored) QA team to achieve a consistent 80% and higher Bug Detection Percentage.
    Functional test teams are responsible for any new functionality pushed to site in a bi-weekly release schedule with an average of 120+ developer days in new functionalities per release where the Bug Detection Percentage of the Automated tests is steady around 50% and the overall Bug Detection Percentage is consistently above 80%.
    Senior QA Engineer for Marktplaats.nl: As QA engineer for Marktplaats.nl I was solely responsible for making the business aware of the need for testing and quality assurance. Up until 2006 no Quality Assurance or formalized testing was being done with Markptlaats.nl.
    Besides creating awareness and buy-in for Quality Assurance within Marktplaats.nl I worked on testing all projects going live to site, starting with a release cycle of twice a week which, under my guidance, was moved into once a week and then slowly but gradually into one release per two weeks.
  • In my period as Senior QA Engineer I initiated the setting up of a formal test environment with a set of feature pools (e.g. environments for solely testing new features) and 2 staging environments (used solely for regression testing).
    Guided the move away from anthill as bugtracker, upgrading to Atlassian Jira, in which I defined workflows for Bugs, minor projects (2 day projects), Site Operations ticketing and many other uses.
    Together with the test manager at the time we started an initiative for offshoring part of testing to the Ukraine, where we hired 2 testers to begin and later on expanded with one more tester.
  • In-Country QA Engineer for eBay.nl: As ICQA I was responsible for integration testing of all new functionality becoming availabe for eBay.nl site after the test teams in San Jose had tested the features already. Besides manual testing I was working on automated testing for eBay.nl based on an eBay own record/playback tool.

December 2003 – December 2005 – Quantiq X-Media

Martijn de Vrieze1 Comment

when: December 2003 – December 2005
roles: Quality Assurance manager, Project Manager, System Engineer, System Adminstrator

  • Projects:
  • Lingo Online (http://www.lingo.nl
  • Vara VroegeVogels (http://www.vroegevogels.vara.nl) Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager
  • Vara Kassa (http://www.kassa.vara.nl) Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager.
  • VPRO Webwinkel (http://www.vpro.nl , not live at this moment) Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager.
  • WIAB admin interface change (http://www.amsterdam.nl)
  • Amsterdam Stadstoezicht WIAB implementation (http://www.stadstoezicht.amsterdam.nl)
  • La Perla Living website (http://www.laperlaliving.com ), responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager.
  • Leiderdorp website ( http://www.leiderdorp.nl ), Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager
  • PostbankKaraoke action (http://www.postbankkaraoke.nl ) Not live anymore at this moment, but visible at http://www.brandbase.nl/karaoke/. Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager
  • Teleac PeuterTV website (http://www.peutertv.nl), responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager
  • Philips AmeezingConcert 1 (http://www.ameezingconcert.nl). Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager. Also installation and maintenance of the application on the hosted server belonged to some of my core tasks.
  • Audit of TeleacNOT corporate websites on performance and scalability
  • Heineken Belkado (http://www2.belkado.nl ) Responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager. Also installation and maintenance of the application on the hosted server belonged to some of my core tasks.
  • Bosbros redesign logo, website and leader (http://www.bosbros.com ), responsible as both Quality Manager and Project Manager. Also installation and maintenance of the application on the hosted server belonged to some of my core tasks.
  • Within Quantiq I was also responsible for the installation and support of all servers, this included test-servers, development servers and production servers. Tasks were amongst others: Installing the OS, updating the patch-level of the OS, installing application servers, databases, JVM’s etc. creating deployment and start/stop scripts and general maintenance on the servers. Servers used within Quantiq mainly used Mandrake Linux and RedHat 7.*
  • Logon Mobile Conference Assistant. The Logon Mobile Conference Assistant is an application which provides a mobile interface to agenda, speaker information, notification, information requests, polls etc. used for conferences such as Tine (Rai-Amsterdam (NL)), Vodafone Developers Summit (MECC-Maastricht (NL), Dusseldorff (Germany) et.al.), BioNale (MECC-Maastricht (NL)).For this project I was responsible for Quality management of all projects, this included load testing and testing the application on all possible devices, varying from modern mobile phones, to PDA, to old mobilephones. Beside Quality Management I was responsible for the production environment, including deployment and monitoring of the application during the conferences.
  • I was quality assurance manager for KPN fixed and mobile customer self-care billing environment. I managed the test team, set-up and described the test cases and performed hands-on bug tracking and hunting. I reported to project manager and director.
  • I was quality control and test manager for the Vodafone Live! Project as well as for other Vodafone sites. The tasks involved initializing the quality process, ensuring unit-tests were automated with a daily quality check, describing and implementing the master test plan and quality control, load testing, security testing, leading the test team at both technical and functional levels. In this role I reported to the development manager and directly to the ICT manager. The Dutch Vodafone Live! Product group are proven monthly to score at the top level of the European group due mainly to the quality of my work. The user group is moving towards 1,000,000.

May 2002 – November 2003 – Finalist IT Group

Martijn de Vrieze1 Comment

when: May 2002 – November 2003
role: Software tester

 
Main tasks at Finalist consisted of implementing Quality Control throughout the company and testing software built by Finalist for our clients.
Finalist is a JAVA/ J2EE company based in Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Amsterdam.

Projects:

  • Vodafone Live! I was QA and Test lead for the Vodafone Live! project in The Netherlands. Testing the system consisted of low-level (server level) testing of the servers, middle level testing of the ER2 billing system and high level testing of the services and end-user functionalities. The environment is a multi-clustered multi-processor distributed server park involving BeaWeblogic, Oracle, Apache, IPlanet, J2EE, XML, JSP, Solaris, Windows, Mobile, LDAP, GPRS, HTTP, HTTPS, SSL. I was responsible in ensuring successful end-to-end testing and problem resolution support within this environment. The nightly builds and development quality process was initiated and managed by me.
  • TNT Post Group (TPG). I was responsible for testing the software we wrote for Netwerk VSP, daughter company of TPG. This software consists of a system for distributing commercial folders through Holland.

September 2000 – April 2002 – Smarthaven B.V.

Martijn de Vrieze

September 2000 – April 2002
role: Software Quality Assurance/Software Tester

 
Main tasks consist of creating and writing test plans and strategies for the software created. Testing the software on all levels, logging bugs and performing the bug tracking throughout the development cycles, doing research after Total Quality Management for the near future, I was also involved in keeping the build procedures up to date. Furthermore I held key roles in Configuration Management and Release Management processes. I maintained the bugtracking system (Bugzilla). As BuildMeister and QA I was moving the company towards an Extreme Programming environment. Making sure every piece of code has it’s own Unit test, helping introducing code conventions, Continuous Integration and testing the procedures within the company itself as well as the code being built
The environment involved a lot of Perl and Shell-scripts for testing and also Java testing tools. I here became very familiar with Jmeter, Junit, Jtest, HTTPUnit and SmartHaven also made proprietary test programs.
Mentoring several junior testers in learning the basic skills of testing and creating test plans and their understanding of Test Strategies.

  • Intelligent Agent Platform. Involved front-end, middle-wear and backend testing.
  • Subme. Involved front-end, middle-wear and backe-end testing. Subme was a web-based intelligent search engine. Based on search behaviour and the ratings to certain sites, subme would enhance the results you get from the web while searching.
  • Personalised Services Platform. This is a complete middle-wear solution, to be used as a communications platform for all media (wap, interactive TV, internet etc.) using xml.
  • Classification Engine. A J2EE component with a swing administration interface, classifies documents according to a pre-defined taxonomy. This piece of software consists of several individual components (TaxonomyManager, Classifier, Profiler and the Swing interface framework and several addins).
  • Language Identifier. Component that identifies languages used within any text (20 + languages)
  • Keywordgenerator. Component that reads through text files and generates keywords according to the weight the words have within this text. This component is used by our customers as a MS Word plugin to automatically create the search keywords one can use to find files in unstructured databases.
  • Indexgenerator. Component that is based around the KeywordGenerator, this application is able to read through several documents or directories and generates an index based on the keyword generated from the files found. Along with the index-phrases it makes references to the various files and the location of those files. All aspects are editable within the Swing GUI.
  • Document Converter. This application, based around third party software is mainly used as an addition to other applications provided by SmartHaven. It is capable of converting documents from various formats into plain text or XML.
  • Taxonomygenerator. By reading through files and directories this application generates keyphrases according to which it is able to generate a useful taxonomy. this taxonomy can than be used for the SmartHaven ClassificationEngine and other SmartHaven or third party applications.