Cole Beernaerts
GAME DESIGNER
Fifa 19 for Switch
I was part of the Switch team on Fifa 19, with the role of development support, which was to support the software engineers by verifying their fixes work and don't introduce any new bugs. I was brought on in April until August 2018, and worked on it until the game had finaled and was ready for release in September. My time working at EA was great! it gave me valuable industry experience, and I enjoyed working with my team. below you can see photos of my team.
Overview
I got brought in on the Nintendo Switch team for FIFA 19 in April, hired through VMC as a contractor, right when testing for the game was in full swing. I was one of two people testing for all the artwork in the Switch version of the game, testing stadiums, player heads, and club packages for any issues or bugs.
Contract Time: 5 months
Team Size: 20+
Role: Development Support
Platforms: Switch
Tools Used: Perforce, DevTrack, Confluence
Logging bugs and verifying milestones
The main responsibility I had was to take any patches made by the software engineers uploaded on Perforce to test it and verify their changes fixed the bugs, and made sure the patch didn't introduce any new bugs or break anything. I corresponded directly with the SE's on their changes and supplied them with data logs and bug reports on any new bugs. I wanted to give as much detail and screenshots/video as possible to make it easier on the engineers and not have to send the bug back to me for more info. When I logged bugs in DevTrack, I made sure to go back and regress them to verify the changes, resolving them, and forwarding them as needed.
For every milestone, I would go and verify all of the deliverables open for testing and give feedback on it's status, forwarding it to the people in charge of that feature as needed. When a new build of the game was created, such as for E3, alpha, and beta, our team would perform in-depth testing on all areas of the game making sure it was ready and met all the milestone requirements.
Reports and meetings
I attended stand-up meetings with my team every day, giving a report on tasks completed, current tasks, and if there are any blockers for my work. The Switch Development Support team would have a bi-weekly meeting to align our focus on best practices, how best to support the switch team, and if the other FIFA teams (PS4, PC, XBOX One) would need extra help testing. Reports would also be sent out at the end of each day to hand off any work unfinished so EA Europe would be able to pick up where we had left off.