Softability / Warner Bros. Discovery — HBO Max (2021–2022)

HBO Max launched on 26 October 2021 in the Nordics, and I was part of a large team of in-country testers — the only Finn. So the testing of Finnish localization across a multitude of platforms fell on me. But that wasn't all: the whole app had to be tested on iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, Android tablets, Android mobile, Chromecast, NVidia Shield Pro, Samsung Smart TV and obviously Chrome, Firefox, Safari.

We went through the major Nordic launch, then various discount offerings, and the season premiere and finale of House of the Dragon.

In the meantime I reported hundreds upon hundreds of metadata content issues — duplicate subtitle tracks, duplicate audio tracks, missing localized episode/film synopses, and adult material available to children due to invalid ratings conversion across regions. I went through the localization codebases for the mobile, Smart TV and tvOS flavors, and called out usability & UX issues. And, as a hobby, I asked enough questions to learn to use the HBO API to fetch metadata content directly from the database and compare it against what the live product actually showed.

Highlight — an automated hardware & content-database testing workflow (built solely by Esa)

I built Android Debug Bridge (ADB)–based automation tools for cycling through the 18,000+ assets in the Nordics — driving the physical NVidia Shield Pro to change languages and settings, search for content, navigate the player via URLs, and take screenshots of the MLP settings, synopsis, etc. This was not "automation testing" (automated test scripts); it was an automated workflow exercising the content database at scale to discover bugs the human testers and their test suites were not capturing:

• Hundreds of misplaced audio languages, misplaced subtitles, and untranslated descriptions across the Nordic region.
• R-rated / adult content viewable under children's profiles — caught and reported, ratings fixed, and thus hidden from under-16s. The ones I caught included The Exorcist, Interview with a Vampire, Wild Wild West, Finding Magic Mike, and Peacemaker (the ultra-violent DC series).
• Numerous titles with the wrong age restriction, caught by comparing applied ratings against the correct Scandinavian classifications (vs the US ratings) — driving numerous re-classifications. Another HBO Max child-safety win.

Bug reports went directly to the database-ingestion specialists and the macOS / Apple TV / iOS HBO Max developers, who acted on them — a fast, appreciated feedback loop. It was a role I genuinely thrived in.

"Esa has proven to be a valuable member of the test team and consistently identified high priority issues that needed to be fixed. With his wealth of technical knowledge and true passion for the application he is testing, he has been a stalwart champion for ensuring the highest level of quality for HBO. I wholeheartedly recommend Esa as a high end addition to any test team." — Matt Don, Senior Staff QA, Warner Bros. Discovery

Loved it there and miss it a great deal. The in-country testing team was cut at the end of 2022 amid Warner Bros. Discovery cost-savings. 10/10 would work there again.