Involvement Period: August 2025 – December 2025
Platform: PC
Game Engine: Unreal
Role: Senior Quality Assurance Analyst
Responsibilities:
- Associate lead position responsible for improving longterm workflows, test strategy, and supporting personal development
- Requirement analaysis, test task writing, and observation of external QA partners in functional QA tasks
- Performance testing and trace collection
- Driving a test case coverage initiative
- Mentoring QAs in maintainable test case structure and writing, using Xray features efficiently
- Server and client log analysis
- Hosting a critical bug triage with leads and tech direction
- Jira and Xray admin responsible for workflows, issues, and automation
Exoborne is a high paced extraction shooter where players scavenge and fight for loot supported by Exo-Rigs that give them individual abilities and perks. I was excited to join the project as its fast and vertical movement was a unique selling point in the extraction shooter genre that reminded me of one of my all-time favorites: Apex Legends.
What I learned
Sharkmob was a perfect fit coming from my position at Bright Star. Coming into a project that is in full-speed development mode, I was able to apply many of the things I learned by creating a test repository and strategy from ground up. My main focus was to improve both our internal workflows and testing strategy, aiming for long-term sustainability, overall coverage, and efficient reporting.
Aside from applying my learned skills at large scale, being at Sharkmob is an incredibly valuable lesson in navigating large corporations and design pipelines. As a Jira admin, for example, any small change can quickly and easily affect dozens of people. Being aware of, and double checking dependencies and stakeholders is crucial in such an environment.
Here are a few of the tasks that I performed at Sharkmob:
Re-structuring the test case repository. With my extensive knowledge in Xray and Jira, I drove an initiative to both extend coverage and make it more sustainable through best practices.
Identifying tendencies and process gaps through production data analysis. Through self-driven curiosity, I started looking at big-picture data of bug lifecycles, created-vs-resolved charts, and issue ages, to identify pain points and long term trends of individual areas and our production culture at large.
Knowledge sharing, mentoring, and sparring with other QAs. I employed my experience as QA lead, teacher, and coach, to challenge my colleagues, point to different solutions, and sometimes I simply asked the right questions.
Collecting traces for weekly performance reviews. This included setting up build and environments on different machines, verifying data, and delivering it to the performance team.
Analyzing client and server logs. Part of the position was to monitor ongoing, repeating test activities, collecting logs, parsing them, and reporting any spam, errors, or oddities to the devs.
Analyzing requirements and writing test plans for feature and fix verification. I helped different teams in their test planning and activities, gathering experience in world, economy, combat, traversal, and performance testing.
Improving repetitive workflows through changes and automations in Jira. I created multiple Jira automations to remove repetetive task creation and worked closely with all QAs regarding necessary changes, tags, labels, statuses, etc.
