About Us and Our Philosophy

Beginnings

Petrie Software 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 15 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 helped introduce 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

Petrie Software is focussed primarily on the following:

• Quality Software
• Reasonable Price
• Customer Involvement
   

Quality Software

We are passionate about creating Quality Software!  To facilitate this, 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.
   

Reasonable Price

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.

We invite you to be involved in the development of our software by talking with us via email (see this page for email address).  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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