Luke Gardner

Background

About Luke Gardner

With a decades worth of QA experience ranging from Xbox 360, PS2 and Wii, to Xbox Series X and PS5, and 30 years of personal gaming experience ranging from the Commodore 64 to some of the latest mobile games, I am well acquainted with video gaming, it's position in our culture and the necessity of Quality Assurance. In my time as a contract Quality Assurance Tester for 7th generation consoles at SEGA and then EA/Doublefine, I utilised TestTrack, BugZilla and MoZilla for black box testing. Through my experience as the Lead Quality Assurance Tester on PC (Browser-based) at Bigpoint Inc. I incorporated our test plan results into our JIRA and confluence pages, and created Macro enhanced spreadsheets in Excel from the design documents, along with running teams, both internal and external, ranging in size from 4-20. My experience at Bandai Namco Entertainment America was an excellent opportunity to delve into the compliance aspect of 7th and 8th generation console testing. Utilising proprietary bug tracking software, alongside Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo test suites, 1st party documentation and guidelines, and usually JIRA, I became familiar with the must-have and must-not-have of compliance. After work and on the weekends while working at Bandai I took classes at a U.S. based technology and gaming College to further my knowledge of the game development pipeline. Game classes ranging the spectrum of programming, design, art, production, and even QA were part of the curriculum. Programming classes such as C++, Python, HTML 5/CSS, Javascript, and Android allowed me the opportunity to see the bugs in the code. Art and Design classes in which I created, modelled, posed, animated, rigged, and programmed the movement of characters and environments allowed me to recognise the delicacy of the work in progress, as well as gain a deeper respect for fully functioning interactions between different disciplines. Now at Kudos QA, I've been given the opportunity to train, and lead, a department full of compliance testers. Already over a year in and we've had an immaculate track record. 20+ first pass products, 20 new testers honed in on their compliance specialisation, 2 new Compliance Leads with more on their way.