Flying Tester

Welcome to my blog!  I just returned from an inspiring week at the STAREast 2011 conference, which I highly recommend.  One piece of advice I often hear at events such as this is to distinguish yourself online, via Twitter, blogs etc.

Since I already have a Twitter account (follow me at @allenjfly), I decided it's finally time to get a 'Round TUIT' (ha) and test my blogging skills.

I have a full time job and plenty to do outside of work, so don't expect too much, but I'll try to keep posting when I can.

I started as a developer with a Computer Science degree, working on software patches for telecommunications systems. This involved a lot of testing to reproduce issues and to verify that the fix worked.  When the telecom market went downhill and I got laid off,

I decided that the testing part was really what I was best at, and have been doing it ever since.

I landed at a small company with no tester through a personal connection, and convinced them they would be better off with some quality control in the development department.  6 years later I'm still there, and still the lone tester.   I've created and maintain an automated test suite, test fixes on every  nightly build, oversee the defect tracking process and filter incoming defects, serve as 3rd level tech support, and perform any other testing task I can think of in my spare time: Performance testing, exploratory testing, etc.  

Thanks for reading, and I welcome your comments and discussion!