July 2005

Turning a program into a sustainable software business – John Warner

Has your mind every drifted and wondered “what could I code that would really make a difference to the world, and be turned into a sustainable software business”. This talk passes on lessons and ideas on what we did at the architecture level, and in terms of processes, configuration management and documentation to achieve this.
We followed a broad agile process of peer testing , daily builds and incremental development, but took a slightly different approach in that we did build a layered platform up front….and stuck to it, with continuous cleanup and periodic spring cleans.
The talk will cover some of the patterns used and the architectural framework, in particular the persistence layer. We’ll talk about the commercial need for a “build it and speed it up later” approach. A key to the product’s success is its amazing configurability and we’ll discuss how that was achieved, and also the way we do configuration management that allows 100’s of customers to all request their own customisations while maintaining one version of the code.
Lastly documentation! Although hard to maintain, it is the level that is important to get right. eTrack uses a variation of use cases to document fanatically the business requirements of every issue, enhancement and feature in a quick efficient manner that works in a virtual environment and results in almost zero rework.

Questions & Answers Session – ADUG Membership

As requested by our members we re-activate an old tradition of having a Questions & Answers session from time to time. Feel free to post your question(s) to our mail list server.
The posted questions can be found on our mail list archive under “Sydney Meeting: Questions + Answers” in July 2005.