The Night Owl.

The Night Owl.

Chris Jones

QA Director / Consultant

A dynamic, creative, yet results driven director seeking new creative & technical challenges. Spending the last 10 years developing QA strategies, processes & teams ensure highest standards of quality for diverse range products apps, games and websites. An energetic attention to detail creative problem solver on the pursuit for quality

Experience:

Blippar – Mar 14 – July 17
Key Projects: Blippar App (AR) & Blipp Builder (Web app)

I was the founding QA member of a small and incredibly fast-paced start-up hired to create structure, develop STLC & processes with set future-proof standards for the company. Over time I’ve become responsible for hiring an entire QA team to support what has now grown into a leading global AR company.

Key Achievements 

  • Responsible for 4 QA members with varied seniority & QA roles
  • Created, documented and set up all QA processes & QA tools from scratch (Automation & Manual)
  • Build QA team structure, RACI & role specs to support both business & engineering needs for the company with QA analysts, QA engineers & QA Testers
  • Setup test management tools pipeline with single library of tests used for manual & automation tests using BDD (Cucumber syntax)
  • Developed test design & test case writing standards & process for creation of acceptance criteria & test scenarios
  • Worked with PMs to setup Jira defining project workflows and custom fields beneficial for all disciplines as well as research plugins to improve the dev production pipeline
  •  Interviewed, trained and mentored 4 QA teams across the company – London, Delhi & New York offices

Key Duties 

  • Always adapting our QA processes & tools for constant improvements & iteration for our testing
  • Working with senior stakeholders to define and agree on requirements, feature-scope and schedule per app release.
  • Working with PMs & developers defining stories & acceptance criteria per feature
  • Hiring for specific talent requirements to achieve and maintain business goals including contractors
  • Plan & manage resource & schedules to ensure productive analyzation & testing for each stage dev of the feature/product leading to issues raised early.
  • Support & brief QA of all levels with SMART goals to achieve effective testing
  • Maintain strong team morale & motivation with self-development with one to one meetings, QA project post mortem reviews, team lunches & PDRs
  • Hands on with Exploratory & functional testing when required
  • Create daily Bug feature status reports to inform production decisions
  • Manage releases via Jira & create release documentation via Confluence
  • Review bugs from QA to ensure writing standards to met to ensure smooth bug fix workflow

    Pentland group – Boxfresh Sept 13 – Jan 14
    Key Projects: Boxfresh website

    I worked as solo QA Consultant for Pendland group for one of their brands called “Boxfresh”,working on the launch of their own E-commerce website with hands on day to day testing as well as advisory capacity for the QA process

    Role Duties

  • Worked closely with Product Owner to Identifying key user stories and creating all test scenarios for testing from scratch

  • Key communicator working between production and client to ensure the required features were developed to the highest possible standard

  • Company’s QA advocate informing people of testing practices as well as what “QA” do.

  • Responsible for completing user acceptance testing, transactional, compatibility testing using browser slack as well as content management tool testing.

BeefJack Studios Jan 12 – Aug 13
Key Projects: Rush Rats, Roboz & Snowflake

Co-founder of BeefJack studios working as Game Designer and Project Coordinator. Tasked with dissecting client briefs then defining potential risks before delivering a finalized brief to specified production teams and assisting production on various game design duties.

  • Ensured briefs were clearly communicated & project deliverables are realistic and assigned to the right team members
  • Researching development tools, game engines and assets to ensure our ability to deliver within time and budget
  • Designing game levels and mechanics, which were then used in published client games.
  • Creating high level test-cases and various game documentation in preparation for use by outsourced QA teams
  • Setup & maintained Jira for project workflows

Distorted Poetry – Jan 11 – Jan 12
Projects: Rundle’s Rolling Adventure & Petri Dash

Joined an early stage start-up assisting in the development of casual games with designing game mechanics & levels as well as leading QA testing throughout production until delivery.

Splash Damage – Jan 09 – Jan 11
Projects: Blink

My main duties were organizing multiplayer playtests, managing and communicating team gameplay feedback to the design team (grey box testing) for the AAA game first person shoot game project called “Blink”. My other duties were creating test cases for regression testing and QA reports providing data towards the game balancing/game design process.

Creative Assembly, April 08 – Sept 09
Projects: Total War Empire & Napoleon: Total War

This was first QA role within a development company working on game projects called “Total War: Empire” & “Napoleon: Total War. My duties were performing smoke tests & reporting performance data as well as regression testing.

SEGA, Project Lead June 06 – Mar 08
Projects: Sonic The Hedgehog, Sega Rally & Beijing 2008

Tested various game products such as Sonic the hedgehog, Sega Rally, Beijing 2008 for game consoles Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.