Software Truthes

24 January 2007

Steve McConnell gives five software truthes in his book “Professional Software Development”:

  • The success of a project depends on not writing source code too early in the project.
  • You can’t trade defect count for cost or schedule unless you’re working on life-critical systems. Focus on defect count; cost and schedule will follow.
  • Silver bullets are hazardous to a project’s health, though software industry history suggests that vendors will continue to claim otherwise.
  • Half-hearted process improvement is an especially damaging kind of silver bullet because it undermines future improvement attempts.
  • Despite its name, software isn’t soft, unless it’s made that way in the first place and making it soft is expensive.

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Posted by Andrew

Las Vegas

15 January 2007

One of my highlights of 2006 was a 4 day trip to Las Vegas to meet with Doug King, one of Calcium’s investors. Doug put us up at Mandalay Bay and treated us to a long weekend of fine food and wine and a few other experiences like Caviar, ZYR and stretched Hummers. I also took the opportunity to take a three hour helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon – which was totally amazing.

Of course it wasn’t all play, and during the days we discussed business and strategy. It was incredibly refreshing to take a step back from the daily time pressures, the weekly issues, the monthly cash-flow, the quarterly profit, the years road-map and strategy and look at the big picture over the next five or so years. Not just in relation to one company and how big we can forecast our earnings and NPV to be – but where the industry and Internet is going and what part we can play. More importantly – can we position ourselves to be ready to meet the new demands in five years, as opposed to just trying to meet today’s demands better.

I can highly recommend, once a year, taking time out with other business people, preferably people who have a different perspective of the industry from you and discuss your five year strategy, then work through the detail of your next year strategy in order to position yourself and your company where it needs to be.

And of course – while you’re at it – have some fun. It helps you to realise that the daily issues that look so important are no bigger than just daily issues.  Tomorrow there will be new issues and today’s stuff will be forgotten.

vegas1.jpg View from the MIX club in The Hotel.
vegas2.jpg The Grand Canyon by helicopter.

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Posted by Andrew

mailPrimer

9 January 2007

mailPrimer – 100% Java, fully extensible SMTP Server

If you’re looking for a reliable, commercial, 100% java SMTP server, that you can extend and customise to your heart’s content – then Calcium Software (www.calcium.co.nz) has a solution for you.

mailPrimer is an SMTP server that has been built from scratch and is sold as an eMarketing service, however, when I say eMarketing – don’t think newsletters and bulk email. While mailPrimer is fully capable of managing your recipient database, sending bulk mail, managing bounces etc – the primary use is to send your daily email.

This is how it works. You change your mail server’s smart-host to relay all mail through the mailPrimer servers. The mailPrimer SMTP server takes the email and breaks it down to bare-bones, then stores it in a SQL Server or My SQL database (or anything else because it uses hibernate). Another java service then polls the database, rebuilds the email and delivers it.

Because every business has different email requirements (trust me – they do!), mailPrimer has been built as a rules engine and everything it does to an email is controlled by rules.

Rules can be created for the server, account, sender, recipient, group of users etc and can be set to match the subject, body, headers, sender, recipient, recipient’s email client etc.

mailPrimer currently has 45 rules – doing everything from cleaning mhtml – automatically embedding images, changing the sender’s email domain, applying an html template, adding tracking etc and the rules are all database driven, so you can build your own rules by implementing a very simple API.

Rules are applied during pre-processing and post-processing, so it is fully flexible and very powerful. mailPrimer is also designed to run on multiple servers with a shared database. Each server is capable of delivering about 200 emails per minute – which is fairly slow – but it is doing a heck of a lot more than most SMTP servers!

mailPrimer has a ton of features built in – such as address validation before accepting emails (to avoid those nasty misdirected bounces) and also keeps its own global database of goodies so that it can apply the sender’s rules, but also consider the recipient’s preferences and capabilities.

If you’re interested in mailPrimer as a marketing solution – send an email to sales@mailprimer.com – but if you’re looking for a solid, commercially built and tested SMTP server that will allow you to really look good in front of your technical and marketing directors, then contact Calcium’s CEO Gael de Kerdanet (gael@calcium.co.nz).

mailPrimer is really leading the world with email marketing – and is another great example of an NZ software company going global.

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Posted by Andrew

Business savvy technologists in high demand

5 January 2007

A report released by CIO Insight in in August 2006 predicted that in 2007, “Hiring will increase for programmers, systems developers, project managers and business analysts who really understand business … this requires business as well as technical know-how, a combination of skills IT executives expect will be difficult to find.

The message to IT professionals is clear: A need exists for talented technicians who can be businesspeople, too, especially if they can function in a global economy.”

Larry Ellison agrees in his book “Softwar” when he says that the person to replace him at Oracle “must be an engineering manager who’s not only very good at building products; he or she must be very good at marketing and selling the products as well. But first and foremost, the person must be a good engineer.”

The fact is – its hard to find good software engineers who have a grounding in business and management with experience in sales, marketing, finance and business operations as well as delivering not just good software products – but products that are right for the market and for investors.

This is where business incubators in New Zealand come into play by taking IT entrepreneurs and giving them solid business support, mentors and connections. CreativeHQ in Wellington (www.creativehq.co.nz) is one example of a business incubator doing exactly this and it is an nice example of the govt, local govt and local businesses working together to develop IT executives who understand business and can take NZ companies successfully to the global economy.

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Posted by Andrew