Just a review of where I started

Originally published in May 2006, I am moving this to my new home.  Enjoy it again or for the first time!

Well as a way to start things here, let me sort of recap my employment, and my foray's into Quality of all kinds over the years.

I pretty much ended up into this after Managing a couple of Support groups, Customer and Technical, and as the person who was the liason to the Engineering department I got exposed to Quality techniques in opening up ways to troubleshoot and report issues.  The more I got involved with the QA department the more I realized how interesting it was, the deconstruction of problems, and the generalized knowledge you gain by having to be familiar with all aspects of the software.  So I buckled down and started studying some programming and process techniques.

Landing a job as the first QA employee at a startup I worked close with the Engineering Team, who were mostly an offshoot of the group I worked with when I was in Support, ah yes the heady days of working with the evil Empire of NewsCorp.  This was the mid-90's when they were in their first move into the internet, and then realized (well the first time anyway) that they didn't get it and laid us all off.  By this time the QA group was 3 people including myself this only took 2 years.

So I took my experience of a few years as a tester, and as management experience pretty much translates across jobs, started at another place as a one man team who grew the team as I began formulating what I knew a group needed at a new place.  Again, as the lovely days of the DotBomb went on, we had fun and lots of beer lunches, then all got laid off.  So I went on to another place, this time we grew the QA group to about 6 people in a year, thinking it was not me I took some time to find a new place and worked as a contributor.  That work was more like a summer job, it lasted from June to September, but at least by the end of it I had been introduced to my future wife.  Moving on took another year as a Contributor and when that didn't work out went back to the start up phase again.  That job lasted 3 years, we built up a solid organization where QA was also the Release Team, as I had done some release work in some of the previous jobs I was given the task, and we at the highest had 8 people total in the group.

Now I am back to being a Contributor, tired of Management, but still enjoying the deconstruction and the learning as I am moving into more Automation and Unit Testing Frameworks.  Never went to school for programming, I am all self taught, but I've been lucky to work with talented people to bounce ideas off of, and its good to have some online communities to share experiences with as well.

Since I am caught up, with just a little background, I'll go over many of the lessons I have learned and am learning...if its of any use to you then good.  If not, I will at least try to make it an interesting read.  Judge for yourself if its worth it.