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RickHowerBackStory

I like this backstory idea, and enjoyed reading the other backstories.

A bit more about why I�m attending this conference:

I�ve spent most of my software-industry life as a contractor/consultant, including working as a QA manager at several places. However, for the past 1.5 years I�ve been a QA/testing employee - a learning experience in long-term organizational /cultural change, and learning to work effectively and happily within a seemingly-inflexible system. As a longer-term participant in an organization, I am able to experiment in new ways with my own methods of being effective, and to also take a hard look at my definitions of �effective��which all seems to dovetail nicely with this conference�

What I really enjoy about my work is the chance to work in, essentially, human engineering laboratories, since most software project issues are people/communication issues and not technical issues. Each project I work on is � to me � an experimental lab in which I and others get to experiment with psychology, egos, communication methods, organizational processes, etc. Since I worked as a contractor at many different companies I�ve been lucky enough to be in a wide variety of �experiments�. Although this may sound like a bit of a standoffish approach, the actual day-to-day reality is the opposite � I try to really get to know the people I work with on a project, and it usually works out well enough that I am still friends with various folks from my contract projects over the years.

More backstory items:

In my early days as a programmer, I developed a shareware application that I distributed via the old Compuserve. During the testing and beta phase I learned my best QA lesson � that my ideas about how smart I thought I was, and my particular ideas about how a user should use a software product, were not necessarily accurate nor relevant. A humbling but invaluable experience.

The best training I had for working on software projects was the year I spent learning group dynamics in an intentional community (commune) in my younger days. Software projects seem to map well to temporary intentional communities.

I grew up in a small town in New York state, then spent most of my adult life in California (San Diego) where I had two previous careers - one as an environmental scientist and another in construction (which also provided me with a good background for software project work). During much of this time I actively avoided computers � I viewed them as occasionally useful tools and that was all. Eventually I bought my first computer and compiler only because the homework in my cognitive science class at UC San Diego required that we code up our own neural networks in C. That got me hooked...

I currently live in Reston in northern Virginia near Washington DC.