March 11, 2002

I am happy to recommend Bruce McLaren as a candidate to join your organization.

Bruce and I first worked together in 1990, and we have collaborated on the same projects for approximately four of the intervening years. We were teammates on several projects at Carnegie Group, including an expert system for small motor design and a system to help technical writers prepare their documents for machine translation. On those projects, Bruce was a software engineer and I was a requirements analyst and knowledge engineer. We subsequently worked together at OpenWebs Corporation on the specification for a rule-based peer-to-peer system. I managed the requirements team, and Bruce managed the development group for the company’s new technology.

In all our work together, Bruce has demonstrated great focus and productivity. I saw this most recently when Bruce joined OpenWebs. Within a month of joining the company, he had mastered the details and complexities of the company’s product vision and had produced a draft specification describing the behavior and implementation of the proposed product. Bruce is equally productive when he writes code. Although the development projects we worked on had very tight timelines, I have never known him to miss a deadline.

As a technical team leader, Bruce has displayed an ability to balance the competing criteria of technical feasibility, customer wish lists, and corporate profitability. He believes in and practices process-oriented engineering, as demonstrated by his contributions to detailed requirements specifications and design reviews at both Carnegie Group and OpenWebs. Despite his interest in state-of-the-art technology and his research experience, his approach to software development is pragmatic and goal-oriented; he does not push to include technical "bells and whistles" for their own sake, but only in response to customer needs and his employer’s priorities.

Perhaps most importantly, Bruce has great integrity and an unfailing commitment to doing a good job for his employer and for the customers he works with. I am confident that he would be a valuable, energetic, and highly productive addition to the leadership of your organization.

Sincerely,

Linda M. Schmandt