I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
We’re making good progress in our ‘next big thing’ which is a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering.
The benefit of having being well funded is that we’ve been able to do a lot of pure Research and Development without having to sprint to revenue. We’re getting a big payback on that.
We’ve been able to take the time to think about what development framework we need to support our product offering. The special characteristics we desire include:
- A way to have near continuous automated regression testing, so that we can release early and often with confidence
- The ability to support different business rules and features for different locations
- Be able to be design lead and separate UI development with core application functionality
- Really good iterative debugging tools
- Lightweight pages - full control of the HTML we send out
- Sophisticated audit trail, logging and playback
- Integration with Visual Studio for productivity
Taking a few months to get the framework nailed (and we didn’t get it right first time) has enabled us to very quickly build the application functionality and make rapid changes as we respond to customer feedback. We’re now ‘dangerously productive’.
Technology-wise we are SQLServer 2005 under .Net (C#), using XSLT as a transformation layer, and Scriptaculous. We looked a lot at Ruby (which I’m using for other things) but are happy with .Net for this project.
We clumsily call this our Unassailability Framework - because by doing this R&D we believe we can add new features faster than anyone else and add new countries cheaper than anyone else. This framework provides us with sustainable competitive advantage.
Without funding, this would have been a significant investment. We may have had to just start writing the application and race to customers and revenue. As we are funded to do this R&D we were able to do things right and are already seeing the productivity benefits of this investment.
I’m not used to having the funding to do things right and have the resources you need up front.
It’s a beautiful thing.
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Good on you Rod. It’s great that your funders give you that headroom and “trust” for you to do the R&D. Short term loss for a long term gain. A 10 trip ticket, if you will.
There’s a lot of companies out there that pay good lip service to R&D, but never really shunt the dollars that way. Others just tell you to go and get a (Big 4) consultancy opinion on “best practice” and simply follow that - because that’s what everyone else is doing! Duh!
It’s refreshing to see faith and investment being put back into IT.
Awesome! & essential to realise the vision.
“End-to-end” process testing should be defined and rigorously maintained when the time comes that speed to market dictates rapid parallel developments.
What about packaging and moving configuration reliably, auditably, and comprehensively between various systems?