Test Lead – Experis – 2011-2012, 2015

Following the Oregon trail.

Salaries remained stagnant all through the recession and I began to look elsewhere for opportunities in video games. A friend who had just moved to Oregon suggested I apply for a role at a company called Experis, which focuses on game test contracts with first-party publishers.

I applied and was happy to have been hired from a single phone call! I moved to Portland and found myself in a Software Test Engineer role on a project called Kinect Rush. It was my first time working on a game that utilized the Kinect peripheral, and I quickly learned that testing on a game that requires one to move around constantly is a great way to get in shape. This was also an opportunity to learn a different set of game test plan guidelines that were more akin to what test engineers execute on non-game projects. I took on a couple of smaller projects in the STE role and once again learned that it’s best to remain flexible to adapt to widely varying project timelines.

My time as a Test Lead at Experis was short, but it allowed me to delve into such areas as automated testing and data-driven test plans, which have often been luxuries at other companies due to the software engineering resources required to create builds with the proper instrumentation.