Ron Patton lives and works in Washington state as a software consultant. His software testing experience is wide and varied from mission- critical systems to children's painting programs. He began his career at Texas Instruments as a quality assurance engineer testing embedded systems and user interface software for industrial automation equipment. In 1992 he joined Microsoft as a software test lead in the Systems Group. His test projects included Multimedia Viewer, the authoring tool used to develop Encarta (R), Cinemania (R), and Bookshelf (R),. and He eventually moved on to become responsible for the software that shipsped with the mouse, keyboard, gaming, telephony, and ActiMates (R) product lines.