DAVID BARRETT
SOFTWARE ENGINEER
(scroll down)
🎴  TRAINER CARD
Pokemon Trainer Card
David
David Barrett

When David is on your team, your Test Coverage and CI/CD pipeline health increase by 20.

Veteran of Microsoft and EA / Maxis — built automation frameworks and test infrastructure for games played by millions.

💎 🤖 🔌 🖥️ 🐍 📊 🏆
Illus. dlmbarrett · ID No. 661607
⚔️  CHARACTER PROFILE
NAME DAVID BARRETT
CLASS Software Engineer
SPECIALISATION Test Automation & QA Engineering
EXPERIENCE Microsoft · EA / Maxis
BIO

Software engineer with a focus on quality, automation, and building the infrastructure that keeps games running right. I've worked deep inside two iconic game engines — crafting the testing frameworks and tooling that developers rely on every day. Whether it's generating exhaustive permutation test suites or orchestrating distributed test farms, I make quality scale.

MICROSOFT INTERNSHIP
⛏  MICROSOFT × MINECRAFT
// GAMETEST AUTOMATION FRAMEWORK
Minecraft internship
📋 ROLE

Software Engineering Intern at Microsoft — embedded within the Minecraft Bedrock Edition team to design and deliver testing infrastructure inside the GameTest framework.

🧱 WHAT I BUILT

Designed and implemented a Permutation Generator Test Automation Framework that programmatically produces exhaustive combinations of test cases from a declarative configuration — eliminating manual test authoring, dramatically expanding edge-case coverage, and plugging directly into Minecraft's GameTest runner to sweep block states, entity configurations, and game-rule permutations at scale.

⚡ IMPACT

Reduced test authoring time for complex permutation scenarios and increased automated coverage of Minecraft's Bedrock Edition systems — enabling engineers to catch regressions earlier in the development cycle.

Minecraft internship
// XP GAINED
⛏ GAMETEST FRAMEWORK
📦 TEST AUTOMATION
🔧 TYPESCRIPT / JAVASCRIPT
🗂 PERMUTATION TESTING

⚒ I helped make this work with commands!

THE SIMS STUDIO
// SOFTWARE QUALITY ENGINEER · EA / MAXIS
David Barrett at EA Maxis with Sims character statues
📸 AT THE STUDIO

Sitting with the iconic Sims character statues at the EA / Maxis studio in Redwood City — the same office where I built test infrastructure for The Sims franchise.

Yes, that green plumbob is real.

📌 ROLE OVERVIEW

Software Quality Engineer at Maxis / EA working across The Sims franchise — designing, building, and managing quality systems at every layer of the development pipeline, from low-level engine testing to large-scale test farm infrastructure.

🏗 PROJECTS & RESPONSIBILITIES

Led development on multiple cross-disciplinary tool development cycles, supporting QA, Design, Artists, and Dev Engineers:

🖥️ TEST FARM ORCHESTRATION
🤖 AUTOMATION SCRIPTING
🔌 ENGINE PLUGIN DEVELOPMENT
📊 INFRA MANAGEMENT
🔎 PROJECT DEEP DIVE

Test Farm Orchestration Management
Managed and evolved a distributed test farm — scheduling, resource allocation, result aggregation, and failure-triage pipelines that kept the CI system healthy across Sims builds.

Automation Scripting Development
Developed automation scripts and frameworks that drove regression suites, integration tests, and feature validation, reducing manual QA effort and accelerating feedback loops.

Engine Plugin Development
Built plugins that hooked into The Sims engine layer to expose testability surfaces, instrument gameplay state, and enable programmatic control of in-game systems from test harnesses.

The Sims 4
📈 SKILL METERS
AUTOMATION
QA STRATEGY
SCRIPTING
INFRA OPS
PLUGIN DEV
DEBUGGING
👾  SKILLS & TECH STACK
— INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE —
👾 LANGUAGES
C++ / C90%
PYTHON85%
C# / .NET75%
BASH / POWERSHELL72%
🛸 TESTING & QA
TEST AUTOMATION / TEST AUTHORING95%
TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT88%
CI / CD PIPELINES82%
PERFORMANCE TESTING70%
🚀 TOOLS & INFRA
GIT / GITLAB / GITHUB90%
SQL DATABASES78%
UNREAL / UNITY / PLUGIN DEV80%
JENKINS / CI-CD68%
contact.sh — bash — 80×24
visitor@portfolio:~$ ./get-in-touch.sh
 
Initialising contact protocols...
Loading contact details...
 
$ cat contact.json
 
{
  "name" : "David Barrett",
  "role" : "Software Engineer",
  "linkedin" : "linkedin.com/in/dlmbarrett",← click
  "email" : "dlmbarrett@gmail.com",← click
  "phone" : "661-607-2174"← click
}
 
visitor@portfolio:~$