Xbox
I took my first formal step into the games industry starting back in 2017, where I joined Microsoft’s Xbox division under contract as part of a sizeable QA team charged with conducting testing and verification operations on the then-unreleased Xbox One X home gaming console, which at the time was publicly known by its codename, “Project Scorpio“. The overall goal of this project for my team was to release a high-end hardware revision to the original Xbox One featuring upgraded hardware that was designed primarily to render upcoming game releases at 4K resolution, spawning the customer-sought ‘Xbox One X Enhanced‘ content release branding in the process, as well as to provide graphical and performance improvements for existing games that had already been released to Xbox gamers through past Xbox One console iteration cycles.
While I was initially signed onto the project in a lower QA Associate position, I was quickly given the role of Quality Assurance Team Lead due to the project’s requirement for additional small team leaders following a near-constant call to increase general QA staffing in order to complete the charted statement of work for the Xbox One X’s upcoming release in the fall of 2017. During my time in this role, I was responsible for driving my own small team while also supporting my original team lead in parallel, and my regular tasking involved activities suhc as delegating tasks and test cases to QA associates, reviewing completed test work from those same associates for submittal to partner teams and stakeholders, and overseeing general updates to team workflows and the internal test lab environment. In addition, my team worked with both internal and external stakeholders to ensure certain game releases promoted alongside the Xbox One X met advertised quality bars, such as ‘Forza Motorsport 7‘, ‘Assassin’s Creed: Origins‘, and ‘Middle-earth: Shadow of War‘.
My time on this project was personally notable for being my first professional opportunity to learn the principles of working and interacting with an interdisciplinary engineering team to achieve a specific high-level goal. This experience was fueled by the constant need to utilize excellent communication skills with both QA associates and project leads in order to effectively meet pre-defined goals and project deadlines. In addition, the Xbox One X project afforded me the opportunity to routinely take part in various engineering processes, such as daily stand-ups and other ritual meetings, trained new team hires in all aspects of QA/QC testing, and assisted with other confidential special projects when necessary.
I ultimately ended up leaving the Xbox One X project in December 2017, as my contract with Microsoft was concluding in a few weeks and I had formulated plans to move to Texas with my wife in order to pursue professional opportunities available to her in that area at the time.
Portfolio Links:
*Used with permission from Microsoft.
*Used with permission from Microsoft.
*Used with permission from Microsoft.
*Used with permission from Microsoft.