Professionally speaking, I've been fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a quality assurance specialist working with CMMi, Six Sigma and ISO 9001 in an effort to drive efficiencies and prevent defects in software engineering. I've also spent many years detecting and reporting software defects as test architect, test manager, test lead, test designer, tester, and test automator. I've also spoken at several conferences. Personally speaking, yes there's a life on the other side as well where I enjoy exploring the great outdoors. I currently work full-time as a Quality Assurance Specialist for a subsidiary of KForce called KForce Government Services (KGS) at the Federal building in Oakland, California. Specifically, I work on a small team contracted with the Veterans Health Administration that maintains new centralized web applications supporting the VA Health System and our nations Veterans. Prior to that I worked for CACI in a contract with the VA where I was the Test Manager for several of these new applications that we are currently supporting today. These applications primarily use the JAVA J2EE platform with a WebLogic application server and Oracle databases. We use the Rational Tool Suite including Rational Functional Tester for automated testing and are on our way to becoming ISO 9001 certified using Sharepoint technologies to manage our libraries and records. Prior to working on VA projects I worked at Bank of America for over six years. There I helped manage the testing for the Bank's massive migration from various desktop platforms to to one standard Windows 2000/XP platform. This included the testing of the platform as well as providing the resources for developers and testers throughout the Bank to test their applications on Windows 2000/XP. We also managed the support for a nationwide production representative test environment. While much of my effort focused on testing needs, I also helped drive quality assurance practices that helped prevent defects, met requirements and brought software projects in on schedule. For example, I designed a requirements management system and supporting process to capture, prioritize, manage, approve and track changes to the desktop for over 130,000 associates. I spent the first 12 years of my career in quality assurance working at Pacific Bell which was bought out by SBC who then acquired AT&T. There I worked on several systems with various technologies performing many roles related to software quality assurance and quality control. I supported automated testing in a tools support organization, lead quality assurance committees, and built tools to support quality assurance activities, defect tracking, test case management and requirements. I was a test lead, tester, test automator, consultant and designer of processes used by those team's I participated on. For more details about my career as a software tester, my resume is online. I can be reached at zallar@testingstuff.com.