This is the stuff I share with conference folks who want to describe me in a few paragraphs to people who may want to hear what I have to say. While the below establishes credibility (or could…), what you really need to know about me is that I’m not afraid to ask tough questions or speak the truth (listen to the ABTesting podcast for plenty of examples). When speaking, I’m occasionally entertaining, but almost always provocative.
Alan has been improving software delivery since 1993 and is currently providing management overhead for a software team at a major media company. He spent six years at Unity Technologies doing similar work. Previous to joining Unity in 2017, Alan spent 22 years at Microsoft working on projects spanning the company – including a two-year position as Microsoft’s Director of Test Excellence.
Alan was the lead author of the book “How We Test Software at Microsoft”, contributed chapters for “Beautiful Testing”,  and “Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation”. His latest ebook (which may or may not see updates soon) is a collection of essays on test automation called “The A Word: Under the Covers of Test Automation” and is available on leanpub . For the latest information on Alan, listen to the AB Testing Podcast which he co-hosts with Brent Jensen.
And here’s the long version I use when I need to give people a lot more background of what and who I am.

I’m a native of the Pacific Northwest, moving from Spokane, WA to the Seattle area when I was 3 years old. I studied music in college, graduating with major degrees in Music Composition and Music Education. I taught music (high school Jazz, and middle school band) for 4 years before taking a year off to get a masters degree in Music Composition.

While working on my masters degree, I got pretty good at using a PC, and making it work with music programs (this was 1992, and I used a DOS based music notation program with all kinds of memory requirements). After graduate school, I worked as a bike messenger for about 6 months. The job was getting dangerous, so I applied for a dozen random jobs on Sunday morning, and ended up interviewing and getting a job at a company called Midisoft, where I was hired to do technical support for their music products. On my first day, they told me I was also their network administrator and software tester.

I worked at Midisoft for about 18 months, learning basic and C while I was there. When it was time for me to go (long story of ethics), I again, applied for a bunch of jobs, and was eventually hired in a contract position to help test networking on Windows 95. They apparently liked what I did, as I was hired as a full time employee six months later, in June, 1995.

I spent 22 years at Microsoft, and worked on a bunch of flavors of Windows and Windows CE, and Xbox One; a stupid science project to make Android apps run on Windows Phone,  Microsoft Teams, and a few other projects probably not worth listing. I spent 22 months (give or take) as Microsoft’s Director of Test Excellence – which was basically an internal role for developing and delivering technical training, and for building community across the company (something I continued to do long after I left that role). One other thing worth mentioning is that I was heavily involved in developing Microsoft’s “Career Guides” – something that I am either proud or ashamed of, depending on how they were used.

With zero reluctance, I left my bags of stock options behind in January 2017, and joined Unity Technologies, where I initially took a role running QA for their services teams, and eventually grew to a VP position where I led an org of ~350 people working on developer tools, web components, globalization, and documentation. After Unity, I worked at NBC Universal for two years before taking a break to hike from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.

I have a blog (angryweasel.com), and a podcast (with Brent Jensen) at https://anchor.fm/abtesting. Something worth sharing out of that podcast are the Modern Testing Principles. We call these “Modern” as an opposition to “Traditional” test last / test quality in approaches, and are Engineering Principles rather than having much to do with testing.

I’ve written a book (How We Test Software at Microsoft), and e-book (The A Word), and contributed chapters to a few others, and I’ve given talks, workshops, and keynotes at software and software testing conferences around the world.

I’m a soccer fanatic, enjoy hiking, and I’m spending a lot of time recently with my dog, Terra.