Matthew Pelly

Experience

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  Electronic Arts (EA)

  Jan 2006 - Jan 2007

  Quality Assurance Software Tester

  Working as a contract black-box tester within the test centre.- Duties included; Completion of test scripts, bug finding and regression.This included a month working with the development team in Crytek’s Frankfurt studio on Crysis.

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  Electronic Arts (EA)

  Apr 2008 - Dec 2009

  Working in the studio with the development team. - Duties included; Smoke testing, regression, build delivery, bug reports and focus testing. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince X360/PS3/PS2/PC/Wii- Involved in mission setups and bug fixing. Zubo DS- Efficiently balanced my workload as an embedded tester while simultaneously working as a designer. - Designed and implemented gameplay for a substantial percentage of the game, including contributing to the overall story and writing much of the script.

  • Embedded Tester / Senior Embedded Tester

    Jun 2007 - Dec 2009

  • Integrator

    Nov 2008 - May 2009

  • Embedded Tester & Designer

    Apr 2008 - Nov 2008
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  Electronic Arts (EA)

  Oct 2010 - Nov 2011

  Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 X360/PS3 incl.Move/PC- Led a team of Embedded testers within the studio and directed the work of the large black box test team in Romania.- Responsible for hiring, training and mentoring the embedded test team as well as organising the shift plan to ensure that we provided 16hour day coverage without burning out our staff during crunch.- Primary point of contact with the outsourced test centre, providing prompt and accurate responses to their queries to ensure they had the information they needed to do the best job possible.- Worked as part of the agile development team, attending standups and providing focused testing and feedback for the various iterations throughout the development cycle.- Regularly attended the project status meetings with the key stakeholders to report on project progress and identify and address any potential issues.- Although the game did not receive very high review scores, I believe our QA team was very successfully run as we achieved first time passes on every SKU.Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1 X360 incl. Kinect/PS3/PC/Wii/NDS- Responsible for creating the Alpha checklist and for designing and building the test suite.- Contributed to the post-mortem process, identifying our strengths and weaknesses to ensure continued success- On the DS project, enjoyed and adapted to the challenge of working with both an outsourced development team (FullFat) and an outsourced QA team (EA Romania).Projects:Burnout DominatorHarry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Crysis ZuboHarry Potter and the Half Blood PrinceTrivial Pursuit Need For Speed Shift (PSP)Family Game Night (NDS)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 1 (DS/HD)Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 2 (HD)Battlefield 3Need for Speed the Run Show less

  • Senior Embedded Test Lead

    Oct 2010 - Nov 2011

  • Embedded Test Lead

    Oct 2010 - Nov 2011
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  Playfish

  Nov 2011 - Jun 2013

  Senior QA Project Lead

  Responsible for managing the Global QA group within Playfish, main responsibilities included:- Managing the compliance testing for all Playfish Facebook products.- Leading the testing across multiple products for any platform wide changes.- Managing the provision of contingency cover for projects in the London studio.- Research and Development of process improvements and encouraging standardisation of process across multiple products and locations.- Providing cover for the QA Manager when away, running department meetings, coaching and mentoring the Project Leads and test leads. - Holding regular one to ones for my team, setting objectives, measuring performance, and assisting them with their career progression.Achievements:- Designed and built our compliance test suite in a manner to disseminate policy knowledge throughout the team and enable the embedded testers to run their own compliance testing.- Developed a new bug workflow in JIRA to suit our model of agile (scrum) development and implemented this across all Playfish titles in or entering development.- Developed a test case management workflow in JIRA and implemented this across Playfish in order to extract a deeper level of metrics.- Contributed to the development of the 'Playbook', a set of criteria to be met at each stage of EA’s Game Development Framework.- Designed and project managed the creation of a modular training course for Facebook games testing for the worldwide QA team at Electronic Arts. Including writing two of the five modules myself.- Helped to determine the mobile test strategy for Playfish iOS and Android titles, mobile and tablet. Defining our methods of compatibility testing and how we would provide adequate testing coverage to 250+ mobile devices.Projects:The Sims SocialSimCity SocialJet Set SecretsMadden SuperstarsPet SocietyFifa SuperstarsA few unannounced/unfinished Facebook and mobile products Show less

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  Hutch

  Jul 2013 - now

  Previously Head of Development Support from June 2019 - March 2021Encompassing QA, Customer Support, Localisation, Tools & Tech development, and maintenance of our legacy titles In addition I am also working as the Producer for our Tools & Tech Development team (Mar 2018 onwards)Previously also Head of Community (July 2013 - Apr 2016)Creators of Smash Cops, Smash Bandits, MMX Racing, MMX Hill Climb, Hot Wheels: Race Off, MMX Hill Dash 2, Top Drives, Race Kings, and F1 Manager

  • Chief of Staff

    Apr 2024 - now

  • Development Support Director

    Apr 2021 - Apr 2024

  • Head of Development Support from June 2019 - March 2021

    Jun 2019 - Mar 2021

  • Head of QA and Customer Support

    Jul 2013 - Jun 2019