BEGINNINGS
Petrie Software Pty Ltd was founded by David Petrie in 2004. He
is the sole owner of the company, and manages its day-to-day
operations. At the present time, he is also the sole programmer -
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 13 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
Before
going into each goal in detail, it is worth noting what is not listed
above - "Customer Service". This may surprise you, but it is
intentional. Petrie Software does not have on-site support or telephone support,
and only has limited email support. The provision of these types
of support services
are very expensive, and would prohibit the sale of Quality Software
at a Reasonable
Price. The function of "Customer Service" is instead
satisfied by the goal of Customer Involvement
coupled with a "try-before-you-buy" philosophy.
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 hopefully 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. This is the main
reason for our third goal of customer involvement instead
of customer service.
Customer Involvement
We invite you to be actively involved in the software development
process. In this way you get to influence the direction of our
products, as well as have issues resolved or questions answered.
Customer involvement comes in the following ways:
- A Public Alpha & Beta Testing Program
(see this page for further details)
This is where you get the opportunity to try out our products before
they are ready for sale. When a brand-new product is developed
and ready for Alpha Testing, it will be put up on this site, and you
will be able to download it and install it for a short period.
You are then invited to sign up to the Alpha Testing Program, at which
point you can continue to use the product until it goes on
sale. In recognition for having been an Alpha Tester, you
will receive a discount when the product goes on sale.
As an Alpha Tester, you get to influence the direction of a fledgling
product, and give suggestions for improvement via our discussion forums.
- Discussion Forums (see this page for further details)
This is the primary mode of communicating with us, and replaces
telephone or email support. 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
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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