From May 2021 to October 2022, I worked at Ubisoft Paris Studio on Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, as a Junior QA Analyst. The game's direction was co-led by Ubisoft Paris and Ubisoft Milan, and I was in a QA team with members from both studios (Paris and Milan). We were also working closely with the QC team from Ubisoft Pune. On the project, I worked on important milestones, such as Alpha, Beta, Gold, and I also worked on the day one patch, and a little bit on the first DLC.
Mario+Rabbids: Sparks of Hope is a tactical RPG game that combines classic battles phases, but also explorations with free roaming, puzzles to solves, NPCs to talk to, etc. Each QA Analyst had a scope to monitor. My scopes were all concerning combat and battles especially. I followed them closely by being a part of different teams, and taking part of regular meetings where designers, producers, programmers and artists were discussing about their progress on a specific scope. It allowed me to easily get informations about what was coming in future builds, if it was normal that some stuff were still not done yet, etc.
It also allowed me to discuss with designers to assess what was the important bugs that needed to be fixed as soon as possible (crashes and softlocks that were obviously blocking the player's progression, but also bugs that prevent people from working on particular features, features not working, etc.).
Following specific scopes also means doing regular checks in Jira's bug database to see every bugs linked to the scopes. For example, some bugs are set in progress, and we must check regularly if the assignees are really working on it, if they have an ETA for a fix or not. We also reassess the bugs's priority, if it was wrongly set or not. The priority depends on the bug's severity and probability. Also, if a bug is not clear for developers, we need to investigate on the way to reproduce it easily, where it happens, add the correct infos.
Developers also send us bugs they found. We had to check these bugs and reassess their priority, to be sure it was worth entering it, and to check with the assignees if it was a risky fix or not.
Whenever there was a big change in code, or a fix too risky, we used to check custom builds, it means that before submitting anything in the game, a developer created a build based on the main game, but with his changes in code. Then, we installed it and did tested the part of the game that were changed (for example, if a developer did a big code change on particular AIs, we tested battles with particular AI-controlled characters and checked some situations to see if everything was fine).
Another part of the job, was to use all these informations to then create test plans regarding these features. We did regular updates before each big milestones, depending of progress's state of each feature, and also depending of removed, added, or re-designed content for example. QC testers used these test plans for their regular tests and we communicated to them the big changes that we did, and also discuss with them about the clarity of it, etc. Discussing regularly with the QC team allowed us to have a good view about what was going on in the game, and if features were stable, testable or not.
Finally, with the gold and patch day one milestones, we also worked with the Mario Club, a team of testers from Nintendo dedicated to test the game. We review their bugs, entered them in our own jira database, and investigate on it. Some of them were already known, some of them needed more repros to check if it was frequent to happen or not. And like with other bugs, we pushed developers to fix them in priority.