Nobody is 100% satisfied with their organization’s approach to software quality, right? With the best of intentions, it’s very easy to talk about code quality but it takes a real and ongoing commitment to constantly improve your software applications.

Having pondered this issue over a coffee (or perhaps it was a glass of wine), we decided to do something about it. As a result, you’re invited to attend a complimentary webinar titled How to Prioritize Software Quality from Start to Finish on June 4, 2009 at 11 AM Pacific Time/2 PM Eastern Time.

Join us for a frank discussion on making significant improvements to your organization’s software code quality. This session is hosted by Francis McKeagney, InnerWorkings CEO, and Peter Waldschmidt, NCover CEO, who will be analyzing the following software industry trends:

• Increasing importance of software quality as software becomes more ubiquitous
• Relative maturity of the software industry as a whole
• Surprising lack of internationally agreed standards for measuring code quality
• Effects of outsourcing and off-shoring on software quality
• Critical importance of accurate metrics
• Implications of code quality issues on margins, profits and revenues

Webcast attendees will also learn how organizations have boosted their bottom line by improving and verifying developer skills before coding, and by measuring code coverage throughout the development lifecycle. Register here to attend this webinar or view the on-demand session at a later date!

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Do you care about agile development techniques? Worried about crippling project pressures? Nasty hidden agendas? Dysfunctional communication channels? The creeping dread of failed software releases?

If the answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, and you can bear to continue, then read on…

Our CTO, Claudio Perrone, is signed up to deliver a lively virtual session on Agile tales of creative customer collaboration.

Hosted by our good friends at the Linked  .NET Users Group, this virtual event is scheduled for Tuesday, June 9th from 10:30 AM - 12:30 PM Pacific Time.

You can sign-up using the details below — don’t miss this one, as it promises to be a great presentation and collaborative discussion:

• Registration link:
  http://events.linkedin.com/LIDNUG-Claudio-Perrone-Agile-tales/pub/72645

Hope to see you there…

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We’ve just spent a full week at TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, meeting and greeting a host of customers, partners, and attendees yet to be enlightened about InnerWorkings! Microsoft’s banner conference went on a crash diet this year, with only 7,000 people in attendance. In these lean times, there’s no doubt that restricted travel budgets and nixed conference requests had an impact on the overall vitality of the show, but it was still a huge conference teeming with developers, software managers, and IT professionals.

Our hand-cranked, eco-friendly flashlight giveaway turned out to be a runaway success — so much so that we ran out of “schwag” after the first full day — folks obviously thought it would be very handy when the next big earthquake hits the region and the power grid fails!

In terms of booth conversations with attendees, we got many requests for SharePoint training and strong interest in Microsoft’s developer certifications (see our certification press release live from the floor at TechEd). I also encountered a number of requests from developers and team leads looking to build skills in ASP.NET MVC, a framework that enables developers to easily build web applications using a model-view-controller pattern.

The highlight for me was a VSIP party on Wednesday night in the Walt Disney Concert Hall — it’s always nice to catch up with Joe Marini and the VSIP team, but it was an added bonus to visit such an iconic building that lords it over the towering skyline of downtown LA. The wood panel interior is almost as spectacular as the brushed steel exterior; a late night concert performance would have topped it off!

In terms of show announcements, booth duty meant that I missed the keynotes but caught much of the news from trusted journalists covering the show.  There were many highlights, but the biggest takeaway for me was the slew of new products that Microsoft will be releasing over the coming year.

Check out the following Windows IT Pro article that summarizes the upcoming releases. We can expect to see lots of activity from Redmond in the year ahead, including the following product releases: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010 CTP, and Visual Studio 2010. Busy times in the Microsoft ant colony these days…

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I encourage you to take a look at Scott Berkun’s recent blog on the top 10 reasons managers become great – it’s good stuff, well considered and an interesting read.
Of course, it’s impossible to boil down the characteristics of a good manager into a shopping list of 10 items, and a notable strength in one business context may well prove to be a weakness in another.

Scott wrote this piece as a counterbalance to his previous blog on why some managers are idiots (or words to that effect). This negative post dips into pop psychology a little too much for my liking, but he’s definitely asking some probing questions about why certain people are just unpleasant to work with.

Scott’s “bad boss” post is inspired by Robert Sutton’s book about Building a Civilized Workplace, which has been on my reading list for about 12 months. Alas, there are about 15 books ahead of it still so I’m not likely to get to it anytime soon.

The challenges associated with managing people (and being managed) are fascinating. Business is all about people — combining variable personalities, motivations, and fears. It’s inevitably personal, often disjointed and messy, but great companies, like great managers, can navigate these choppy seas and strive to get the best out of their staff.

Time and again we’ve seen how spectacular results can emerge when people are aligned to work towards a common business goal. This is particularly true in the world of software startups, where so many stakeholders and disparate skills are blended together to take an idea to its logical conclusion and execute it well. But don’t kid yourselves — despite the shiny workplace awards, there are some bad bosses at Google too!

What kind of manager are you? Have you ever dealt with the angry boss sporting a chip on both shoulders? Share those war stories - we’d love to hear about them…

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A quick note to let you know that InnerWorkings will be at SEPG North America 2009 next week — if you’re planning to attend the show, drop by our booth where we’ll be talking about all things related to software process.

SEPG will be a big draw for anyone who gets their kicks from discussing the value of a well planned and executed process methodology within software teams — the show will run the process gamut from CMMI, People CMM, TSP, PSP, Agile, Six Sigma, ITIL and ISO standards, and other performance improvement methods.

We’ll be there throwing about our own unique brand of self-paced learning for development teams new to implementing PSP/TSP. As many of you know, PSP was established to improve software quality by providing individual developers with a set of disciplined practices for software development, and is a prerequisite for developers who join a TSP team.

More specifically, InnerWorkings will be making an announcement about a major partnership in the software process field and what that means for organizations looking to implement PSP/TSP in a scalable and cost effective manner. We’ll also be announcing details of our collaboration with a prominent university in Mexico to streamline the implementation of TSP. This development effort stems from Mexico’s nationwide TSP initiative, which aims to train 57,000 PSP software developers by 2013. No mean feat!

Oh, and we’ll be giving away tons of free stuff at the booth…so don’t forget to stop by if you’re in the vicinity.

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I take it for granted that software development is one of the most knowledge-intensive professions in the world. With new tools, platforms, and technologies being released at breakneck speed, you have to wonder how most developers keep up. Well, in many cases, they simply can’t!

It’s far too easy to pay lip service to the skills and productivity of your software teams — I’d be buying barrels of oil if I had a penny for every time I heard “we only hire the best” or “our lead developers go to XYZ conference every year”.

It’s hardly a sustainable or scalable solution to keeping your software team’s performance at its peak, but many companies seem to believe/hope that sporadic ad-hoc approaches to developer productivity and software quality will be enough to carry them along.

If you’re skeptical about this approach to supporting software development, I encourage you to attend this free 60-minute webinar from InnerWorkings. Our CEO, Fran McKeagney, peppers the session with personal war stories that illustrate the challenges and contrasting approaches to building mission-critical software applications, including:

• Competitive loss of a longstanding multi-million dollar travel software contract due to poor coding skills and recurring code quality issues
• Failure of an ambitious global web platform release due to crushing performance issues, unforeseen bugs, and lack of skills visibility

Drawing on his own experiences as VP of Research & Development in past roles, Fran also tackles the following issues associated with managing complex software organizations:

• The need to create a research and learning culture at the heart of your software organization
• All your software team’s decisions, goals and objectives should be data-driven
• Building empowered teams of problem solvers
• Is it OK to ask software teams to be accountable?

We’ll also share some interesting polling data from the live audience and a spirited exchange of ideas comes through in the Q&A session. Be warned that viewing this archive does require a registration (sorry) but hopefully the presentation and discussion give more than enough value to warrant that intrusion. Enjoy!

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I thought I’d share a little good news with all our friends and followers this afternoon. I’m happy to announce that InnerWorkings was named a winner of the prestigious annual Bersin Learning Leaders award.  We made our mark in the “Vendor Innovation” category and everyone here is very proud of the accolade, needless to say!

In a world where “astroturfing” or fake product reviews are more common that most web users realize — check out the latest scandal where Belkin’s CEO issues an apology for the shady work of an overzealous employee — it’s nice to get a genuine award that recognizes our hard work in bringing InnerWorkings Developer to market.

Of course, we’ve been saying the product is highly innovative for years (!) but it’s always fun to see some external validation of our unique approach to helping developers learn by doing. Most people remark on our rules-based code judging engine as the most innovative element, but we’ve also pushed the boat out in terms of our SaaS deployment, executive learning dashboards, and web-mediated customer support.

Nor does it stop there — we’re constantly looking at new ways to add value to the software organization and support professional developers who make the wheels go around. With your help and feedback, I’m hoping we’ll be back next year to win another learning award for an innovation yet to be hatched.

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Performance is a widespread term in our everyday lexicon — people have come to expect immediate results and punish poor performance at every turn. From cars to athletes to local schools, almost everything is measured in the context of “high performance”.

Until recently, terms like “high performance fund” and “top-performing stock” were bandied about by over eager finance pundits on every network TV channel. Today you’re more likely to hear terms like “bail out”, “credit crunch” and “economic meltdown” –  all because of poor performance in the housing and financial sectors!

But what about our world of enterprise software applications? Can the same demand for high performance be said to exist as developers build and deliver software applications? We know that it’s easy to overlook application performance in the rush to craft feature-rich software solutions; failing to test your solution’s performance under stress is a fundamental oversight, but many developers simply aren’t well versed in the skills of optimizing application performance.

Every time we survey our user base about what developer skills are most important, we get flooded with requests for training on application performance and optimization. Not likely to turn a deaf ear to such requests, we have released the following Drill to address key application performance issues:

• Improving Performance in .NET Framework Applications (3 hours)

Intended for intermediate developers and above, this Drill provides tips and techniques for optimizing the performance of your precious .NET applications. It contains lots of performance-related goodies to help your application shine in the eyes of its users:

• measure application performance
• create a custom generic cache to improve the performance of a Windows Forms application
• split a long computation into smaller sub tasks
• reuse objects that are expensive to create or frequently created
• defer the execution of expensive calculations until they are required
• improve performance with AJAX service calls and CSS Sprites

Have you got other suggestions for learning content on the intricacies of improving .NET application performance? If so, let us know as we’d really like to hear about them.

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There’s nothing quite like a trip to Seattle in December - for a Dubliner like me, the wet and dreary weather offers a gentle reminder of home! I traveled up to Redmond last week to meet Jim Kayler, a colleague from Wisconsin, for a scheduled interview on Channel 9 about InnerWorkings.

The interview is titled Teaching developers: A peek inside the inner workings of InnerWorkings and it runs to just under 30 minutes. Both Jim and I didn’t quite know what to expect — a friendly chat or a serious interrogation — but we both agreed it was a really enjoyable experience. I encourage you to check it out and let us know what you think:

It was fun to meet Charles Torre, one of the originators of the Channel 9 experience, and a very good interviewer. Charles moves around easily between deep technical subjects, product architecture, startup growing pains, and general business topics. It’s always a bit disquieting to see (and hear) yourself on camera, but the whole interview was a blast and hats off to Charles and the production crew for making it flow so smoothly.

I spent some time researching Channel 9 before our interview, and it’s hard not to be impressed with the site’s pedigree; the same can be said for the talented cast of 9 characters who founded it. After spending some time with Charles and the team, it’s clear that they hold fast to their 9 core principles. This approach is centered on emphasizing ‘the conversation’ by setting PR and spin aside to speak directly to the Channel 9 audience about technologies and industry trends that matter.

The one guiding principle that I found present as a viewer and participant is that people and their stories really matter on Channel 9. Companies aren’t just about product launches, milestones, and press releases — it really is about people working hard to make an idea become a reality. Maybe that’s a better definition of a business than anything you’ll find in a shareholder report or analyst briefing.

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If you’re one of 6,000+ developers, software types, and vendors attending Microsoft’s signature PDC 2008, be sure to stop by the InnerWorkings booth #113 — it’s lime green, you can’t miss it! With keynotes from Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia, I’m expecting a forecast of heavy showers and dense cloud cover!

I’ll be hanging around our booth to chat, swig coffee, and dispense a motley collection of free stuff and daily prizes. We’re actually raffling off some full-year subscriptions to InnerWorkings Developer (an $1,875 value) and hosting a Safari Books Online raffle for a free subscription. Our good friends at Safari have kindly given us some quality programming books to reward lucky show attendees, so don’t go home empty handed.

Lastly, we’ll be showing new demos and great InnerWorkings schwag like compact pocket tools and USB flash drives. So make sure to stop by the booth and say hello! I’m told there will be candy (or sweets for the Europeans) on offer also, so don’t let me eat it all myself.

To get in the mood for this trip, I’d recommend the following classic from my old favorite, Randy Newman:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aegiztiE58

Enjoy the show…I’ll see you in LA!

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