TLDR: I love shipping games, I took some time with my family, I'm excited to ship games again, and I can't wait to meet everyone at HBS!
More info:
Sorry this may be the longest intro mail in the history of the planet. I'm excited to be back in games and typed more than I planned on!
I'm a local who grew up on Mercer Island, double-majored in Economics & Environmental Studies at WWU, and started at Microsoft Games Studios in 1998 as a tester on card & board games. After shipping a ratings system, Bridge 2.0, and Chess 2.0 for an event with Gary Kasparov, I became the test lead for the Windows Internet Games on Win ME & Win XP.
While that project had minimal focus on gameplay, I loved the production aspect of getting our old 1980s game clients (with hard coded strings and everything) compliant with Windows quality gates. I learned about localization (something the Zone hadn't done previously), STRIDE threat modeling, right-to-left displays, pseudo-loc, high ASCii, double byte character sets, COPPA, accessibility, creating keyboard controls for mouse-dominant games, and working across several divisions. I loved it. I had fun learning Visual Test (which was similar to some Java I had picked up in college) and taking advantage of keyboard access to create some basic black-box test automation.
In 2001 I moved over to the Roleplaying Adventure Technology (RAT) team and helped ship some titles including Nightcaster, Psychonauts, and Shenmue II. After developing a way to automate testing on our Xbox titles, I because an SDET Lead and supported titles like Sudeki, Dungeon Siege, and Kameo. In the evenings I started teaching classes at Cascadia Community College on test automation. A group of us gave the first presentation on test automation in games at GDC in 2004, which was fun.
Around that time, several SDET teams merged with some other shared tech teams to become the MGS Tools aND Technology (TNT) Team. I was the Test Lead/Test Manager for the test tools, R1 graphics engine, and the title server backend for Project Gotham Racing 3, a 360 launch title.
Losing interest in the 3-year planning and budgeting marathons of Test Managers, I switched things up and joined the Rare Test Team to focus on developing test tools & automation for titles like Viva Piñata.
When I had the opportunity to join Xbox LIVE Arcade, I took it! It was a chance to get back to my roots of casual games while leveraging Xbox shipping experience. This is when I met Mitch! I of course loved the people of XBLA. I also loved getting to work with multiple 3rd party partners as well as meet some folks in MS Research for Kodu.
At XBLA, one funny conversation happened over South Park. To my surprise, I was assigned as the Test Lead for that project.While I am OK with the company shipping all kinds of titles, I did not want to have to work on something that featured racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. I knew South Park prides itself on discriminating against everyone, and claims that neutralizes their jokes. I am someone who volunteered with Hands Off Washington in college and lost some friends I had had since I was 3 years-old because my heart is committed to equal rights. I am part Native American and my bio mother was born on a reservation. I grew up with a fleet of Jewish friends on the Island. All of those things that HR nag people about? I actually believe them to my core and have zero tolerance for that kind of crap.
After an impassioned plea to my Test Manager to not have me work on South Park, he said that because he knew he could trust me to not let any stuff slip by that would not represent MS well, he wanted me on the project. He asked if it'd be OK to have poor jokes, though, because of Kenny. I was raised by a single mom and still remember the sting of hand-me-down corduroy pants (which are the worst kind of hand-me-downs because worn-down ridges are so visible.) I sighed and said I'd accept poor jokes with a cringe, if he could guarantee no LGBT, gender, race, or religious jokes. Deal made.
In 2008 I moved over to work in ACES as the Train Sim Test Lead. When TS was cancelled 10 weeks later, the department was restructured so that everyone started working on a military sim project. Our team focused on ground physics during combat. I learned that when our American soldiers patrolled in Humvees and drove over mines in Afghanistan and Iraq, shrapnel projected up into the vehicles with devastating results. MRAPs were being deployed, with v-shaped hulls to help shrapnel project away from our soldiers, and part of our job was to take the new design into consideration in the sim. Although the entire studio of 200 people was laid off in January 2009, working on that project was one of the most meaningful projects I ever worked on.
After the studio was laid off, they hired 20 of us back to start a new Flight Live studio, and I was hired on as the new Test Manager. I helped shut down the old studio (which sucked), start the new studio (which was awesome), and took on some Project Management tasks along the way.
In 2010 I had our first son, so I took some time off. When it became apparent he needed a little more support than daycare could provide, I decided to officially stay home for a while.
During my time with my family and while learning about sensory processing disorder, autism, ADD, and how crazy boys are in general, I produced an outdoor sculpture show, volunteered with Little Bit (which provided horse riding therapy for children with different abilities), did some volunteer genealogy work, and volunteer taught Hour of Code at our elementary school for 3 years.
I also picked up some very basic PhotoShop skills. In 2013, some devastating tornadoes struck Oklahoma and killed 24 people. As I learned about it in the news and heard about how groups of people were organizing to sweep through fields to look for photos, the genealogist in me couldn't stand the idea of family photos being lost forever. I joined a facebook group created to reunite photo owners with photos, and started helping with digital restoration from afar. Over the past couple of years, here are a couple of restorations I've done for Operation Photo Rescue, a friend, and a tornado victim.
Now that my youngest is 1 and is making eye contact, playing peek-a-boo, and doing all of the typical baby things, I am ready to dive back in to making games! I am very excited to learn a whole bunch of new stuff, help, and meet the team!
-Jennbo
Boku (in XNA) and South Park and 6 second party titles: Wallace and Gromit, The Maw, King of Campus, The Price Is Right, Universally Challenged, and Cletus Clay
Longest ever:
More info:
I'm a local who grew up on Mercer Island, double-majored in Economics & Environmental Studies at WWU, and started at Microsoft Games Studios in 1998 as a tester. At the Zone, I focused on card & board games like Bridge 2.0 (This landed me in an emergency conference call with Warren Buffet because the new release no longer supported his Win 3.1 machine. 6 months out of college that was a scary call to take!) I had fun writing little JavaScript tools to expedite the manual test process.
After shipping Chess 2.0 for a project with Gary Kasparov, I became the test lead for the Windows ME & Windows XP internet games. While that project had minimal focus on gameplay, I loved the production aspect of getting our old 1980s game clients (with hard coded strings and everything) compliant with Windows quality gates. I got to learn about localization (something the Zone hadn't done previously), STRIDE threat modeling, right-to-left displays, pseudo-loc, high ASCii, double byte character sets, COPPA, accessibility, creating keyboard controls for mouse-dominant games, and working across several divisions. I loved it. I had fun learning Visual Test (which was similar to some Java I had picked up in college) and taking advantage of keyboard access to create some basic black-box test automation.
In 2001, after the Zone split into 2 departments and after I shipped XP, I moved to the Roleplaying, Adventure, Technology (RAT) team. I joined the Nightcaster team a month after they were supposed to have RTM'd to help them lock things down, get compliant with TCRs, and ship.
After working on a French project for a few months that got cancelled, I moved on to Psychonauts. I loved everything about this title. Well, almost. The production side felt one part was way too difficult, but the developers did not. During usability testing, my job as QA was to stand next to the white board behind the mirrored glass and draw a tick mark every time someone died. OMG my arm hurt because everyone died all of the time and it totally irritated me.
In investigating if there was a way to automate that process, I was told that it was not possible to do any automation of any kind on Xbox. I knew no one had done it, but that didn't mean that it wasn't actually possible. Over the weekend I poured through the Xbox XDK, figured out how to instrument the controller XDK sample with the debug channel XDK sample, and modified the debug channel XDK sample to read and execute batch files. It was possibly the worst code ever compiled in the walls of MS, but dang if I hadn't shown a proof of concept that worked! I became an SDET Lead.
After shipping Shenmue II (I'm still hoping for a Shenmue III someday), my team focused on figuring out the best way to automate the games of RAT. I learned so much during these years, including that automation can save time & money sometimes, but it can also have a horrible ROI if not used strategically. Fully automating walkthroughs of Sudeki looked awesome and shiny, but I think that manual testers are still the smartest use of resources for playthroughs. Modifying tools to test assets in Dungeon Siege was awesome, though.
Around 2003 my team joined a couple of other SDET teams that had popped up in MGS and we became a shared SDET team. I primarily continued to support RAT titles but I also got to help with Kameo: Elements of Power. Around 2004 our team merged with some other tech teams around MGS to become the Tools aNd Technology (TNT) team. I took on the role of Test Manager and owned testing for our test tools, the R1 graphics engine from Rare, and the Title Server shipping with Project Gotham Racing 3, a 360 launch title.
While I loved the people and opportunities on that team, I wasn't excited about spending time in 3 year-planning marathons and high-level budgeting plans. I missed being in the trenches so in 2006 I decided to jump back to being an SDET to spend time actually writing tools for the Rare test team. On Viva Piñata, I owned tools, automation, and certification because I love owning the endgame shipping process.
When I had the opportunity to join Xbox LIVE Arcade, I took it! It was a chance to get back to my roots of casual games while leveraging Xbox shipping experience. This is when I met Mitch! I of course loved the people of XBLA. I also loved getting to work with multiple 3rd party partners as well as meet some folks in MS Research for Kodu.
At XBLA, one funny conversation happened over South Park. To my surprise, I was assigned as the Test Lead for South Park. I met with the Test Manager to tell him that pretty much anyone else would be a better fit for that project. While I am totally OK with the company shipping all kinds of titles, I did not want to have to work on something that featured racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. I knew South Park prides itself on discriminating against everyone, claiming that neutralized their jokes. I am someone who volunteered with Hands Off Washington in college and lost some friends I had had since I was 3 years-old because my heart is committed to equal rights. I am part Native American and my bio mother was born on a reservation. I grew up with a fleet of Jewish friends on the Island. All of those things that HR nags people about? I actually believe in equal rights for everyone and have zero tolerance for that kind of crap.
After my impassioned plea to not have me work on South Park, my test manager said that because he knew me so well, he could trust me to not let any crap slip by. He needed Microsoft to be represented well, so I needed to go jennbo on anything that would reflect poorly on the company. He asked if it'd be OK to have poor jokes, though, because of Kenny. I was raised by a single mom and still remember the sting of hand-me-down corduroy pants (which are the worst kind of hand-me-downs because worn-down ridges are so visible.) I signed and said I'd accept poor jokes with a cringe, if he could guarantee no LGBT, gender, race, religious, or sexual assault jokes. Deal made. For part of my job, I reviewed some South Park episodes for MS (and jennbo) appropriate content.
