About Me
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 as the Software Test Automation Architect. I have also served as QA Manager here for the past six years. “T.W.I.A.” insures home and business owners along the Texas gulf coast against wind and hail damage caused mostly by hurricanes.
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 a client 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 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. Lately, I have been enjoying leveraging our unit and functional test automation frameworks in a continuous integration environment using Hudson. I think it’s the satisfaction of knowing that I am helping to turn an eight our day of testing into a twenty-four seven operation with relatively little overhead cost that keeps me engaged in this work. But the more I work on our unit and functional test frameworks, the more I am finding myself thinking about how to make the development process better. I think the future of software testing is in software development and vice-versa. From a technical perspective, I seem be drawn to the grey area between development and testing and hope to continue to work to fill this gap with more knowledge and experience while continuing to build on my leadership skills. As a technology leader, I would like to someday have the opportunity to be in a position to lead an organization to success, whether it be my own or one I truly believe in, given the broad base of experiences I have accumulated over the past fifteen years as a software professional.
In my free time, my left brain has been been developing iPhone applications using Objective C. I have found this exercise to be useful, possibly profitable, and fun. When it comes right down to it, it has to be fun. For everything else, I use my right brain. 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.
