What testing games at EA taught me

Before I started building my own projects, my job was to break other people's.

I tested games — first as a QA Analyst at PixelBowl Studio, then as a Game Tester at Electronic Arts, across console, PC, and Nintendo. Honestly, it changed how I think about software more than any tutorial ever did.

A few things stuck with me

Quality isn't a step at the end. It's a habit. If you only think about it right before shipping, it's already too late.

A good bug report is a gift. "It crashes sometimes" helps nobody. Steps to reproduce, what I expected, what actually happened, how bad it is. Boring? A little. But it's the difference between a bug getting fixed today or sitting in the backlog for a month.

You need different eyes for different problems. Functionality, UI, performance, regression — a build can sail through one and fall apart in another. You have to keep switching how you look at it.

How it shows up in my code now

These days I'm the one building, but the QA brain never really switches off. I think about edge cases earlier. I try to break my own work before anyone else can. And I don't really trust a feature until I've tested it like I'm trying to get it to fail.

That mindset — caring about the person on the other side of the screen — is the most useful thing I took from QA.