This is the deep-dive. The main site tells you what I do; this one shows how: the verification pipeline, the defect craft, the certification work, and the playtests that kept a full AAA dev team honest at EA Tiburon.
↓ warning: contains actual processQuality isn't a phase at the end. This is the loop I run on every feature a pod owns, every sprint, and it's how I worked an unannounced AAA title.
Before implementation, I sit with the developers and pin down how the feature should behave and feel. If we can't write it down, we're not ready to build it.
i was the QV point of contact for my pod. this is where that starts.
Test plans, cases, and stories in JIRA and Confluence with entry and exit criteria, built to be reusable across the feature's whole lifecycle, not thrown away after one pass.
As work lands I review it against the design intent we agreed on, flagging risk areas ahead of sprint deliverables instead of after them.
Functional, regression, smoke, and sanity passes across builds. Different questions, different depths, same goal: know exactly what state this build is in.
Defects logged with clean repro steps and honest severity, routed to the owning dev, and blockers escalated to resolution before milestone dates. I reported my pod's quality status up to the Development Director.
Certification and submission support against first-party requirements. On Madden NFL 26, that meant platform validation for the Nintendo Switch 2 launch.
Four pieces of the job that separate senior QV from button-mashing, with the receipts to match.
Shipping on a brand-new console means meeting Nintendo's submission requirements with zero room for interpretation. I provided platform validation and first-party certification support for Madden NFL 26's Switch 2 launch: compliance passes, submission prep, and release readiness.
launch title on new hardware. no pressure.
I work with engine and build access across Frostbite, partnering with developers on investigation and minor fixes. I review in-engine assets, using working knowledge of Maya and Substance Painter to judge models and visual systems against the intended bar.
qa living inside the engine. rare breed.
Our leadership encourages hands-on AI adoption, and I ran with it. Working in VS Code with GitHub Copilot, I build internal tools that make my QV team faster, starting with test design briefs: slow, manual, and inconsistent, until tooling turned them into a repeatable pipeline that other QA teams now use.
built it for my pod. it escaped.
On Madden NFL 26 I owned Presentations & Visuals: broadcast cameras, cinematics, and polish on one of the most fan-scrutinized areas of the game. My photography background is why the team trusted me to judge composition, lighting, and readability deliberately.
the pretty stuff is measurable. fight me.
A fictional example, real standards. This is the bar I hold pod reporting to, and every part of it earns its place.
The full story of how I ran team-wide playtests for a large cross-discipline dev team, from build readiness to sessions with senior leadership, lives in its own case study.
Build candidate selection, smoke passes, blocker triage, hosting and moderation, and the near-miss that taught me process beats heroics. Context, numbers, and lessons included.
Open to senior quality verification and QA opportunities where quality is treated as a craft, not a checkbox.
want the whole picture? the main site lives at chrislacroix.dev