BEGINNINGS

 
Petrie Software Pty Ltd was founded by David Petrie in 2004.  He is the owner of the company, and manages its day-to-day operations.  At the present time, he is the sole software developer - all software that you will find on this site has been personally developed by him.  He lives and works in Sydney, Australia.

David has over 14 years of experience in the Information Technology (IT) industry - specifically in software development.  He has a Bachelor of Business (Computing) degree and a Graduate Diploma of Computing.
 
His first 13 years of experience was spent with the one employer, starting as a Junior Programmer and over time becoming a Team Leader and Chief Software Architect.  The software developed by this company is primarily accounting-based software sold to Small and Medium Enterprise (SME).

As Team Leader, David introduced Agile Software Development principles - as defined by the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology.  This included the introduction of such practices as Unit Testing, Iterations, Daily Stand-up Meetings and Pair Programming.
 
 
 
PHILOSOPHY / BUSINESS PLAN
 
 
Every business needs a clear understanding of how it will operate and what its goals are.  Petrie Software is focussed primarily on the following, in order of importance:
  • Quality Software
  • Reasonable Price
  • Customer Involvement
 
Quality Software

Quality Software comes at the top of our list - because that is what we are passionate about!  We will not let anything compromise the quality of our software.  This means that:
  • a large portion of our time and effort is channelled into the task of creating quality software; and
  • our software is released when it is ready - not before
To facilitate the act of creating quality software, we employ many of the practices compatible with Agile Software Development.  For example:
  • Test-first Development, using Unit Tests - this is a software development practice where the programmer must create automated tests before he/she writes the code that is being tested.  This leads to very robust code, and guarantees that once a bug has been found and fixed, it won't reoccur in the future.
     
  • Modular (de-coupled) object oriented coding - this style of programming allows us to respond easily to changing requirements and to different environments.  One module can be rewritten or overhauled without affecting any other modules.
     
  • Small Releases - because testing is an integral part of the development process, a new release can be done at any time.  This allows us to respond in a timely fashion to any problems raised by you, and to implement any new ideas proposed by you and accepted by us.  We hope that this will encourage you to participate in our discussion forums and become an active part of our development process.
 
Reasonable Price

What more can we say?  It is our goal to sell quality software at a price that is reasonable, and that you can afford.  Everything about the way we do things is to achieve this end.  Anyone can create expensive software, almost anyone can create expensive quality software, but the challenge is to create affordable quality software. 
 
 
Customer Involvement

Our passion is in creating quality software - and we invite you to be actively involved in the software development process.  In this way you can influence the direction of our products, as well as have questions answered.  We want to work with you in addressing any issues you may have while using any of our products.

Customer involvement comes in the following ways:
  • Discussion Forums (see this page for further details)
     
    We invite you to access our discussion forums and:

    • read what other people have written, and the responses they have received
    • ask questions - the answers we give you will benefit not just you but anyone else who reads them and may be having the same problem
    • make suggestions about how we could improve our products
       
  • Email (see this page for email address)

    We invite you to contact us via email and discuss any issues that you have with our software.  We will help and guide you in how to best use our software, and welcome any input and ideas you may have which will improve our software in the future
 
We want you to be involved - because by being involved you will help us create higher quality software - and that is our passion!
 
 
 
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Copyright © 2010 Petrie Software Pty Ltd (A.C.N. 110 519 723)