April 2011 – Ongoing – Polteq Test Services

Polteq is an independent provider of international testing services. Polteq professionals can fulfil the role of test engineer or test manager within your organisation. Furthermore Polteq is specialised in supporting organisations to improve their testing processes, test automation, managing test outsourcing and providing training sessions (including certification).

Polteq started in 2000 with the aim to provide high quality testing services.
Through its unbridled commitment and achievement at the highest level, Polteq has gained a leading position within its branch. Polteq sees the testing of information systems as a specialty, which is becoming more and more important every day and plays a crucial and central role in the delivery of good quality IT solutions. And this is becoming more challenging because of increasing complexity of these systems.

All the employees at Polteq chose this company to fully focus themselves on the testing craft in a small (approximately 100 professionals), flexible and informal company with an open working culture, where everyone is appreciated and respected. All colleagues know each other and this forms a unique bond of professionals. Testing and current company affairs are discussed regularly at informal meetings. Enjoyment at work is very important to us at Polteq.

To ensure the high quality of service, Polteq finds that continuous education for all its employees and the sharing of knowledge and experience are a must. Not only the development of testing methods and techniques are of importance but also the development of personal and communication skills.

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

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.