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2026 Schedule

PDT 08:00 – 13:00 | EDT 11:00 – 16:00

BST 16:00 – 21:00 | CEST 17:00 – 22:00

EEST 18:00 – 23:00 | IST 20:30 – 01:30

Wednesday 20 May 2026

15:00

Platform open

15:10

Game Quality Academy lounge

Early bird networking lounge

16:00

Welcome

Jimmy Bischoff, Head of Quality
Xbox Game Studios

16:05

Quality Checkpoint: making our conditions of success clear for our partners

Mathieu Turle
WWQC Operations Director
Ubisoft

As our QA&QC Teams were systematically facing the same difficulties from one project to another, we implemented a new ceremony – not only to make our partners acknowledge what is important for us, but also to create the opportunity to discuss about our conditions of success & raise the risks that we foresee. This presentation will be about how we get there, what we ended-up with, and some learnings about what works well & what doesn’t.

  • Intermediate
  • Studio / Partner Interactions

AI powered QA tool development

Chris Watkins
Co Owner and Principal QA Engineer
Punch Up Games

LLMs are built on piracy, but we can use them to make sweet QA tools. You know all those tools, scripts, helpful little things you want for testing that your support engineering team is never going to get around to building? Now you can build it yourself.
Stories of tool development and a hands-on walkthrough of using Claude Code. Doing it Live (probably)

  • Foundation
  • AI in Game Testing

16:45

Comfort break - 15 minutes

17:00

Risk-based QA strategy for live and R&D games

Derek Rakos
Director, QA
Riot Games

A practical framework for identifying and prioritizing risk, language to communicate QA value beyond bug counts, tools to focus testing where failure would hurt most, and guidance on evolving QA strategy as projects mature.

  • Intermediate
  • Test / QA Methods

"Our Secret Sauce" - behaviour, codev and shift-left

Nazim Zahaf
Senior Development QA
Behaviour Interactive

This presentation aims at peeling back the curtain on some of Behaviour Interactive’s best kept secret; its internal strategy and application of QA as real force multiplier in a shift-left strategy.
Over the last 30 years, Behaviour has leveraged its expertise with multiple partners across a vast breadth of industries; however since 2019 our QA strategy has shifted to the left, bringing in QA earlier and giving them a voice in our client-partner interactions which as resulted in better games, better partnerships and better QAs.

  • Foundation
  • Studio / Partner Interactions

When test cases aren’t enough: How quality leaders build trust in creative, global game teams in the AI era

Ritu Chowdhary
Director – Quality Control
Ubisoft Pune

Even the strongest test teams sometimes ship games that disappoint players.
This talk explores why games can be technically “working” and still fall short of player expectations and how testers and quality leaders can influence outcomes earlier by reframing risks, shaping product conversations, and helping teams focus on what truly matters for players.

  • Advanced
  • Test/QA Planning & Strategy

17:40

Comfort break - 30 minutes

18:10

Communicating value through data driven storytelling

Ben Wibberley
Founder & Managing Partner
DAQA

QA tends to report “all the data”. This presentation focuses on communicating the value of QA, by understanding your audience, their motivations, and using the right KPI’s for data-driven storytelling.

  • Intermediate
  • Data Usage

Test plan evolution and optimizing test focus on Apex Legends

Eric Padilla
Senior Quality Designer
Respawn Entertainment (EA)

In Live Service games, test cases can quickly become unmanageable, making it hard to focus on what truly matters and what requires manual verification versus automated results. Discover how Apex Legends Quality Verification reduced manual testing by aligning the right level of certainty with the criticality of features and leveraging technology to expedite testing – all while maintaining expected release quality.

  • Foundation
  • Test / QA Planning & Strategy

18:50

Comfort break - 15 minutes

19:05

Surviving the test of time: automation in Dead by Daylight

Rémi Veilleux
Senior Programming Technical Director
&
Jeremie Dakin-Perron
Senior Test Automation Specialist
Behaviour Interactive

Join us for a session on the automation strategies that helped Dead by Daylight grow into a top-performing live game. Learn how we scaled automated testing across platforms, improved quality and performance, and delivered strong ROI through greater efficiency.

See how performance dashboards and KPIs drive continuous improvement, how Unreal Build Graph simplified our build pipeline, and how Gauntlet and Data Validators enable comprehensive testing and early issue detection. We’ll also cover dedicated server performance KPIs, functional tests and smoke tests to help prevent regressions as the game continually expands.

  • Intermediate
  • Tools & Automation

Torque about data

Tim Marshall
Solutions Architect
Xbox Game Studios

Great testing outcomes need insightful data analytics: reliable telemetry, consistent definitions, and dashboards people actually use. Learn the production patterns we rely on—separating data from reports, shared templates and standards, source control, and AI-friendly structure—to keep quality reporting scalable and sustainable. All recommendations are grounded in real scenarios from Forza.

  • Intermediate
  • Data Usage

Quantifying the vibes: turning the nebulous into something tangible

Alex Smith
Quality Designer – LiveOps Lead The Sims 4
EA-Maxis

In a world driven by hard data, we in games QA face a unique challenge of trying to turn subjective statements like “Tighten up the graphics on level 3!” into something measurable for dev. Drop into this chat to explore some ways I’ve found success breaking down these vibes and turning out something quantifiably actionable.

  • Intermediate
  • Soft Skill Development

19:45

Comfort break - 15 minutes

20:00

From prototype to production, machine learning at scale with nexus

Neilson Mackay
Group Technical Director
&
Hugo Munoz
Technical Director
Electronic Arts

Building machine learning solutions opens up powerful opportunities for Quality Insights. By analyzing gameplay video, telemetry, and other data sources, we can uncover defects and patterns across thousands of hours of play from automation, playtests, and real users.

The challenge is not proving these solutions work. It is scaling them. Moving from a single use case to something that works across a team, and especially across many teams, requires consistent pipelines for ingesting, storing, validating, and presenting data. In games, we naturally prioritize creativity and uniqueness, which means these workflows often end up fragmented. Each team has to solve the same problems again and again.

Nexus removes that barrier.

Originally built to give teams easy access to gameplay video, similar to a YouTube-like experience, Nexus has evolved into a shared platform for quality insights. It provides a team-agnostic way to access and explore large volumes of gameplay data, including video and telemetry, through reusable and flexible data flows.

Today, Nexus enables teams to go a step further. It allows you to passively apply your ML or automated analysis solutions across massive datasets. Instead of manually reviewing individual sessions, you can continuously analyze hours of gameplay from automation, playtests, or live environments to identify issues and trends.

Just as importantly, once a solution is proven, Nexus makes it easy to scale that solution across other teams without rebuilding everything from scratch.

On top of data access, Nexus also supports how teams act on insights. You can search, store, report, share findings, and even log issues directly from what your models or workflows detect.

The result is a platform that helps QA teams move faster, scale their impact, and focus on what matters most: improving quality across the entire game experience.

  • Intermediate
  • AI in Game Testing

How to successfully create automation and actionable insights with limited support

Michael Leslie
Senior Quality Lead
&
Ryan Johnson
Quality Engineer
Xbox Game Studios

This session will cover some reasons why automation plans fail and how you might be able to use already existing game functionality to create Automation/Actionable Insights. Examples given of how this was done using 2 projects, 2 different automation types, and how it went from nothing to large scale coverage in phases.

  • Intermediate
  • Tools & Automation

Principles of esports testing: designing for high level gameplay

Erika Lytle
QA Engineer
Riot Games

With the rising trend of players immediately pushing for competition and esports in every new multiplayer game, QA professionals and play-testers must understand the balance considerations critical to maintaining game health. Through the lens of Valorant, we’ll discuss key methods for designing an esports-level playtest and why it’s an essential tool for any live service or multiplayer game.

  • Foundation
  • Test / QA Methods

20:40

Game Quality Awards

20:55

Closing remarks

21:00

After hours networking lounge

22:00

End of Day 1

Thursday 21 May 2026

15:00

Platform open

15:10

Game Quality Academy lounge

Early bird networking lounge

16:00

Welcome and day 1 highlights

16:10

Panel

AI tools are everywhere in QA — but what’s actually delivering real results?

Panelists:
Rex Black, Independent
Andrew Fray, Test Automation Consultant, Automated AF
Ionut Codreanu, Head of Studio, Funcom
Aniruddha Pawar, Assoc. QC Director, Ubisoft
Dann Webster, Senior Director, Automation, 2K

AI tools are everywhere in QA — but what’s actually delivering real results? This panel cuts through the noise: what’s working today, what’s falling short despite the promises, and what looks promising but hasn’t proven its ROI yet.

  • Foundation
  • AI in Game Testing

Panel

How to effectively communicate the value of QA to studio stakeholders

Panelists:
Georgia Mae Ayling, Quality Engineer 11, Xbox Game Studios
Nadine Martin, Senior Manager, Test Services, PlayStation Studios
Naz Rivero, Manager, Test, 2K
Nate Stoddard, QA Director
Bartosz Wlodek, Quality Director, Ubisoft

How to effectively communicate the value of QA to studio stakeholders.

  • Foundation

17:00

Comfort break - 15 minutes

17:15

Telemetry that works: lessons from across XGS

Chelsi Hohnbaum
Senior Solutions Architect
Xbox Game Studios

This talk shares hard‑won lessons from across Xbox Game Studios on what makes telemetry reliable, trustworthy, and genuinely useful over the life of a game. Attendees will learn how to avoid common pitfalls, align teams on intent, and take practical steps toward telemetry that supports quality, engineering, and informed decision‑making.

  • Intermediate
  • Data Usage

How to test your game on a budget: strategies, methods, and failures drawn from experience

Michael Debus
Senior QA Analyst
Independent

If you work in Quality Assurance at a small studio – or you’re part of a small studio without dedicated QA – this talk is for you. My goal is simple: share the mistakes I’ve made so you don’t have to repeat them.

I’ll walk through the strategies that actually worked for me while testing games on a tight budget (or no budget at all): hands-on matrices to track testing activities, lessons on return on investment when managing student testers, and pragmatic approaches to processes and automation.

  • Intermediate
  • Test / QA Planning & Strategy

17:55

Comfort break - 15 minutes

18:10

Rising through the ranks: anatomy of a quality lead

David Jenkins
Release Manager
Aonic Games / Megabit Publishing

Offering some practical advice on taking your first few steps into Game Quality leadership. This talk is aimed at those new to, or aspiring to, QA Lead and equivalent roles.

  • Intermediate
  • Career Growth

Automation against all odds

Miruna Bercaru
QA Producer
Funcom Games Bucharest

The reality of automation looks very different when you strip it of theory and ‘shoulds’. This talk covers our experience implementing automated testing in a game project that was not built with automation in mind: without unit tests, plans for them, or stable development windows. It focuses on the practical compromises, workarounds, and lessons learned from building automation in a constrained and imperfect environment.

  • Foundation
  • Tools & Automation

QA judgment in the age of AI

Derek Rakos
Director, QA
Riot Games

How AI changes QA decision-making, where it helps, where it fails, and why human accountability matters more, not less.

  • Advanced
  • AI in Game Testing

18:50

Comfort break - 15 minutes

19:05

The secret life of bugs

Dusty Levenberg
Accessibility Product Manager
Riot Games

Accessibility and usability walk into a tavern. The barkeep says, “Sorry, we only serve things players notice and rage-quit over.” Need another drink after that? Make sure you make it to Dusty’s Qualicon talk for more! (dad jokes included)

  • Intermediate
  • Test / QA Planning & Strategy

Player housing in World of Warcraft: A QA retrospective on building quality at scale

Caleb Wheeler
Quality Manager
Blizzard Entertainment

Player Housing represents one of the most ambitious new evergreen features in World of Warcraft, introducing systems, player expectations, and technical challenges unlike anything previously released in the game.

This session is a high-level QA retrospective on how quality was established, scaled, and ultimately delivered for a feature that was new not just to players—but to the wider development process itself.

The talk explores how Blizzard QA approached Player Housing from its earliest starting point, how the QA organization was structured to align with design, engineering, art, and production, and the testing methodologies required to validate a highly customizable, player‑driven system at massive scale. Along the way, it highlights unexpected factors—both technical and cultural—that meaningfully improved quality outcomes.

  • Foundation
  • Test / QA Methods

19:45

Comfort break - 15 minutes

20:00

A WoW QA tools quest: From monolith to SOA

Will Burton
Senior Software Engineer II – Quality
Blizzard Entertainment

This presentation tells the story of how the WoW QA Tools team evolved a core desktop tool, Quest, from a successful monolithic application into a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to improve scalability, developer velocity, and user experience.

  • Intermediate
  • Tools & Automation

Pause with purpose: a playbook for trust and strategic alignment

Hakim Ronaque
Senior Quality Lead
Xbox Game Studios

Often teams run fast yet rarely pause to think big. This session shows how to design intentional team sessions that strengthens relationships and clarifies strategy. You will learn a simple blueprint for shaping objectives, crafting an agenda that balances connection and decision making, and turning discussions into measurable commitments. We will cover facilitation tips, artifacts that bring alignment back to the day to day, and a follow up cadence that sustains momentum across vendors and partners.

  • Intermediate
  • Wild Card

20:40

Game Quality Awards

20:55

Qualicon 2026 wrap up

21:00

After hours networking lounge

22:00

End of Day 2

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