Wednesday, I attended the SPIN meeting where Parasoft CEO, Adam Kolawa, spoke to us about the software process that serves as a foundation for his latest book, Automated Defect Prevention: Best Practices in Software Management. Joe Wirtley stepped up again and provided his input from Wednesday’s .NET User Group. The group brought in a well-known guest speaker. Joe, thanks for making sure this information made it into the community’s hands. [...]

Hey, next week is the most active week of the month in terms of the user group community in Cincinnati. One of the purposes of this space is to highlight the generally high-quality of the content and information transfer at the different user groups in order to drive attendance. I would estimate 98% of the Cincinnati developer/BA/PM community does not take advantage of some of these excellent, reliable, and low/no cost resources.

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Happy Valentine’s Day! I ran into a lot of people at last night’s SPIN. The meeting was held at the PDR offices, and PDR’s QA Practice Director, Pat Freeman, presented on Software Quality Metrics for Decision Making that we’ll get into in a minute. Kishore distributed copies of Better Software magazine. You can apply for a free digital subscription. About 30 folks attended this meeting. Matt Cardarella, Katie Pattison, and Bridget Ganow (I’m sorry if I butchered your last names) of Speedway traveled from north Dayton to attend this meeting. As I said earlier, SPIN will change the way you work and increase the quality of your output, and seeing these folks make the trek down just reinforces SPIN’s value for me.

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I had lunch today with Joni Burton, who recently moved from CIBER to Trasys. Joni took the president role at Trasys and has the opportunity to guide and work with that organization unencumbered by delivery responsibility for organizations that had no reporting responsibility to her.

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The latest DevCares, from my perspective, was an appropriate deep dive after Tuesday’s MSDN Event covering application security. The MSDN Event was a little less than stellar, and we found out why at DevCares. Uber presenter (and ex-LÛCRUM-ite) Bill Steele had a family emergency, so the MSDN presenter was probably working off of one-day’s notice. It’s forgivable. Mike Wood picked up the ball and handled DevCares. Given the circumstances, Wood handled the ball with the heart of the bat. Get it? Wood? Bat? Oh, never mind.

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I’ve known Mark Windholtz, currently of ObjectWind, for a number of years. In fact, while I led LÛCRUM’s custom application group and was considering a different role within LÛCRUM, I contacted Mark to see if he would be interested in taking over in my place. I led a team of about 20 incredibly talented developers and architects. My leadership and management philosophy required my giving my full attention to my guys. They came first. I practiced servant leadership, I trusted fully in my team, and they gave me their full respect in return. Not that I’m anything special, but I didn’t want just anyone taking over this team. Now it’s not that Mark and I are best friends - our families don’t hang out together on weekends or anything like that - still, I considered a very short list of folks to take the reigns, and Mark was on that list. Although flattered, Mark declined the offer, and he and I are still friends.

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MSDN happened to Cincinnati this week. The latest MSDN event blew through on Tuesday bringing with it a wealth of knowledge and gifts. Heck, that’s why we go to these things, right? Well, that and the half-day of work This event was not as well attended as the last event that centered on .NET 3.5 and the latest release of Visual Studio. It was probably the topic, writing secure web apps, because we’re all writing secure web apps (ehem…cough…cough). Good to see everyone’s on board for this. After you write your next web app please share the URL with me. Seriously.

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