Mike Jennings

Summary

I’m a 30+-year QA pro with a passion for quality user experiences and workflows. Fostering vibrant user communities allows me to make highly effective QA decisions. In 1991 I was an audio guy recruited to QA products in the nascent desktop video field, helping create powerful content creation tools for desktop computers. My career arc has taken me through workflow and asset management, collaboration, publishing, OTT content distribution, to mobile media applications, and IoT development. I'm not particular about the kinds of products and services I work on; I engage fully in whatever project I'm working on. That said, I'm most at home with audio and video content creation tools. My philosophy is that any tool used in creative production should not make you have to think about the tool once you've familiarized yourself with it. Inconsistent, unreliable or unpredictable tools introduce unacceptable disruptions in creative production workflows. This drives a holistic, user-workflow-obsessed approach to QA for me. Tools that I use to inform and enhance my QA include • for white-box and automated testing, creative and novel use of AI not just to accelerate test framework development but to analyze code and documentation • Elaborate hand-built relational databases for bug tracking, asset management, interoperability test results, device compatibility and more • Unceasing pressure to stay in touch with users, tracking their real-world workflows and pain points • Relentless user advocacy so that tradeoffs can be evaluated in a more informed, user-focused way My customer focus allows me to: • Guide risk analysis • Reduce adoption friction by providing useful, consistent user documentation • Take an elevated view of groups of related feature requests or bug reports for more meaningful assignment of priority and severity Serving my quality goals and philosophies has required research into a broad range of disciplines including video compression, broadcast video, formats (pixel, file, storage, interconnection, compression, encapsulation), color science, and metadata modeling and interchange. I’m nerdy about documentation, compression, audio, video, metadata, device interoperability and databases, as well as IoT, home automation, high-quality lighting and technical/computational photography. I have also deployed, modified and maintained PHP/MYSQL-based dynamic web sites built on osCommerce, Zencart, and Joomla. I also maintain a 90's style analog/digital hybrid home recording studio.