At heart, I am a bridge builder, pattern matcher and acute observer. This comes out in my passions about testing, analysis in all its forms in software development, quality, art of too many kinds, and the buzzing, blooming, confusing world we live in. (And cats, if I’m completely honest, but I try to minimize that side of things unless I’m around other feline addicts.)

I like making things better, whatever that takes, and I greatly value the diversity of views and skills of those around me.

My education stretches from Comp Sci / Information Systems to Theatrical Design, and my experience is in everything from Healthcare (my first love) to finance and, these days, to telematics devices used for vehicle fleet management. I began studying Theater as a way to gain a better understanding of how those “arty” people thought. I had always been a math and science geek (this was before computer geeks really existed much), but I didn’t really understand how people could see the world as other than black and white. I learned a lot, about far more than I had ever anticipated. Now I’m hopelessly hybrid. It’s been a wild journey and one that is always interesting.

Within testing, I am most closely aligned with the Context Driven school of testing. I do manual and automated testing, but focus heavily on exploratory testing on Agile teams and helping groups create and tune test strategies to their particular needs. Most would consider me fairly technical for a tester, and I can and do write automation from the ground up, but my strength is in understanding the big picture and balancing the business and technical aspects of the system. I’m good at breaking things, and at figuring out why they are broken, then using that to figure out what else may be broken too! On Agile teams, I spend a lot of time on Systems and Business Analysis activities as those are often areas that my developers are happy to have someone else take on.

Outside of work, I can be found in working on my art, reading SF, history, or non- fiction, gardening, traveling to see my geographically dispersed family or to Minnesota’s North Shore, and, yes, indulging the cats.