During the third year of my degree, I was lucky enough to get a placement at Dubit again in the Quality Assurance team, despite have little experience. Over the course of the year, I worked on around 20 projects at odd times for clients such as GoMadKids, PBS Kids, MBC3 and Letterland. During my time at the company, I was QA Lead on two projects – one for Dreamworks and one for AFL. Below, you can find out more about the projects and my roles in more detail:

DreamWorks Create was the first project I was in charge of during my placement year. The project itself was fairly big for a new-starter, as it compromised of a game on a website (Slushious), a social network (Family Gallery) and the social network’s Unity-based companion app.

The Create site and app are designed for children to make things such as pictures and models both on and offline through  a variety of games and web pages. Things created online can also be shared to the Family Gallery social network, which allows approved family members to comment on them or send stickers. More information about the product can be found here.

During the project, I:

• Conducted smoke testing on the new, daily builds of the game, app and website across multiple desktop, laptop and mobile devices.
• Created a test plan for the website and app, which featured test cases to be completed for each smoke and/or systematic test.
• Created flow diagrams for the website and app hierarchy using diagrams, design mockups and copy text sent to us by the client. These were checked against in every build.
• Used JIRA to report issues, as well as a Google Sheets document to update the client on issue progress, including when a reported issue had been fixed and commenting on any found issues.
• Conducted testing at the client’s request if an urgent issue was found.

The second project I worked on was AFL’s Bounce – a social app aimed at kids that provides them with the best videos, pictures, quizzes and polls, direct from AFL and their favourite teams. Kids can choose to follow a number of different team channels – which provide them with content ‘bytes’ relevant to their chose team. They can also favourite the content to save for a later date.

On the server side, the Bounce app’s content is created and managed with the CMS, which was also build by Dubit. The CMS had to support many different users that could be one of three roles. Each role had a different privilege level – only admins could add and delete users, whereas only managers and admins could approve and reject content.

This was the first project I was involved start to finish in – right from the design document to post-launch. Over the development cycle, my responsibilities were:

• To comment on the app and CMS design document from a QA perspective.
• To create and update the test suites for both parts of the project and follow them every update.
• Test all areas of the app including interfaces, screens, quiz functionality, byte functionality, different user cases and processes and video player functionality.
• Test all areas of the CMS including content creation and deletion, content appearance and scheduling, channel creation, file uploading and management, security testing and checking user roles.
• Communicate with the developers and producer regarding design choices and issues.
• Create dummy content to test the CMS and app functionality.
• Migrating CMS content between different versions.
• Conducting hotfix testing when required.

In my free time, I have participated in paid test cycles run by uTest, a networking website for quality assurance testers. Most of my tests have been on Android applications and games, though I have also participated in desktop website testing as well. Participating in these tests has taught me skills such as USB debugging on Android devices in Eclipse and has allowed me to continue my QA work after placement.

In my second year of university, I took part in a Ubisoft Playtest Day at Ubisoft Reflections on a PC game. This was my first experience of testing for a number of years and involved taking part in an exploratory test of the game while Ubisoft staff took notes on our play style. At the end of the day, the group was asked our thoughts on the game, what we liked and didn’t like, as well as how much we were paid. In exchange for our time, we were given a free Ubisoft title to take home (I chose Far Cry 4!), as well as an activation for the game we tested once it was released.