February 17, 1994

Subject: Rick Gansler

I met Rick Gansler while he was involved in the development of our TeamLinks for Macintosh product a number of months ago. During this time he impressed me as being someone who, as a developer, had an innate sense of what product quality and reliability really mean. I was surprised that Rick, as a contractor, seemed to take more care in his designs and implementations with respect to quality than many of the full time employees. He worked very closely with us (the TeamLinks Quality Assurance group) to insure various bugs we found were addressed as needed. He quickly became known by our Q/A group as a quality advocate.

In late 1993, we planned a ramp up of our Q/A and Testing personnel to insure complete test coverage of our TeamLinks products. I was elated to hear that Rick might be available for a brief time period to assist us in our testing effort. I had some reservations, since many successful developers do not see any worth in taking on periodic test/QA positions. Rick, as I had hoped, agreed to take on the position to help us during this critical time of product testing.

Rick is outstanding as a team player. His ability to tactfully and professionally present problems and negotiate resolutions with the development team members is extraordinary. Additionally, as our workload increased, he cheerfully offered more of his time to assist us.

As a contributor to the efforts of our test group he excelled in many areas. His written and oral communication skills proved to be an effective asset to the group as he offered a number of ways to improve our automated script capabilities and processes. He provided updates to our test scenarios and created well written, tactful bug reports. His development expertise provided us with many insights into the use of new test tools and applications as well as specific recommendations on how to address various test problems we encountered.

Our bug reporting system became operational in July. There were between 1 and 6 people testing the product during the July 93 - February 94 time period. In the brief 6 weeks Rick was working with us he entered over 180 bug reports. This totaled almost 20% of the entire bug database. Truly a dedicated and well focused effort.

While a Macintosh and C based developer by choice, the above indicates his flexibility and ability to focus and take the initiative to do well on whatever his assignments. A dedicated, sincere, and ambitious worker, he's a tactful, team player that I sincerely regret to lose.

Given the opportunity, I would immediately ask Rick to come and work for us either as a contractor or as a full time employee.

Tim Sagear
Manager,
Office and TeamWare Engineering QA/Test
Digital Equipment Corp.