Hello World

   I guess everyone has to start off with a first post.  Here's mine.  Let's see how I do.  In the infamous words of Admiral James Stockdale, “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?”  My name is Steve Rowe and I'm a Development Lead in a test organization.  We work on some of the audio and video pipelining in the Windows operating system.  I expect to cover a lot of topics in this blog.  I plan to write about digital video.  Perhaps some primers about how it works, what the surfaces look like, etc.  I'll probably also rant about testing from time to time.  The role of testers in an organization is something I often think about.  Expect some words from me about how test should be viewed.  It is my opinion that testing is often seen as second-class.  Either it is an after-thought or it is a necessary evil.  Either way, testing is not given the respect within the organizatioin it deserves.  A solid test team will make a product.  A poor test team will destroy a project run even by the best developers.  I have interest in design and project management methodologies.  I plan to say a few words about design patterns, scrum, agile development, etc.  Finally, I'm currently taking a computer architecture class at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.  I suspect that I'll be speaking a bit about how the underlying architecture of a product may affect your code.  So, that's who I am and why I'm here.  Let's see how well I do about following through on this.