Greetings software development and test community! My name is Gregg Yows. I live in beautiful Austin, Texas. I feel very lucky and privileged to live here because of the elite community of technology leaders that also live and work in the area. I am currently employed at the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association and have held many technical positions here from QA Manager to Java Developer. T.W.I.A. insures home and business owners along the Texas gulf coast against wind and hail damage caused mostly by hurricanes.

I began my career with a bang at Trilogy Development Group and subsequently pcOrder.com. Long hours and dramatic ups and downs became addicting. But finding bugs in our software deep inside our client’s server room was beginning to change my opinion about our processes. This led me to the software testing field. After three years at pcOrder.com, I moved over to another exciting start-up called Globeset, Inc. There, I learned the core skills of software testing in an environment that was filled with some of the most talented developers I have ever worked with. After some dramatic changes and a merge with Visa, I decided that I was ready for another challenge. I was brought on as the QA Manager for Tantau, Inc. Within six months, Tantau would be sold to 724 Solutions in Canada and most of us in the Austin office were given the opportunity to move to Toronto or, well, find something else.

At this point, I felt I needed to expand my education. I was accepted to the University of Texas Engineering Management Masters Program. While attending classes, I was traveling to San Antonio to work with another start-up called Digital Defense. DDI sells products and subscriptions that test networks for security vulnerabilities. This was my first experience with real hard-core hackers and my learning curve was challenged, to say the least. We had several successful releases of our flagship platform. During this time, I created a PMO to manage all of the projects that were in the pipeline for DDI.

After graduation and growing weary of my drive to San Antonio and back, I decided to look for something closer to home. I found Texas Windstorm on a recommendation from my brother-in-law who had done some consulting here. T.W.I.A needed someone to come in and create their QA group from scratch. We started with five developers and myself as the only test engineer. Since then, we have grown to over twenty developers and nine testers, all of whom I have hired and trained. Recently, I found myself longing to write code again. I decided to give up my role as QA Manger at so that I could focus on developing test automation for our test and development groups. After the success of my automation test framework development, I was moved full-time into a Java development role. For the past couple of years I have been hacking out Java beans on JBOSS, working with Hibernate and other components and frameworks popular with  Enterprise Java. So what next? Lately I have been fascinated with social networking, SEO and Internet marketing. I am convinced that companies who neglect these things will fail in the next five years and I want to be on the fore-front of this movement. I’m learning all I can these days and implementing much of it to distribute my music to the world. What a cool feeling it is to wake up in the morning and find out you just made 9.99 while you were sleeping! I want more of this.

Please check out my right-brain activities as well. Life balance is what I believe gives me my edge and I value my creativity as much or more than any of my technical expertise.  I enjoy songwriting, working in my recording studio, fishing, hunting, shooting sports, golf, frisbee golf, woodworking, home improvement projects, auto repair, Coen Brothers movies, MMORPGs and most of all, being with my wonderful wife of fifteen years and our two gorgeous children.