Development Partners - branching out

My company, Software Strategy, has existed for over five years now and has been successful within the terms I’ve set for it. Now its time to try something new.

That doesn’t mean I’m giving up Agile - although I must admit to getting sick of the word - nor does it mean I’m giving up delivering training courses - if anything I’m expanding here, Giovanni Asproni now delivers the courses too. Nor am I stepping away from Coaching - although I increasingly prefer the term Consulting because I do give advice and I think true Coaches don’t.

No this is an addition. Software Strategy is now going to undertake work for clients - you can subcontract your work to us. I’m teaming up with Alan Griffiths and Giovanni Asproni, I’ve known these guys for years through the ACCU (formerly the Association of C & C++ Users if you want to know).

There are three reasons for doing this:

Opportunity: I believe that Agile working provides an advantage to companies, I also believe there are opportunities for companies that work this way.

Better: Alan, Giovanni and I truly believe we can do a better job than many of the companies out there, call it skills, call it experience, put it down to Agile or Craftsmanship or even the ACCU. We just do. And the engineer inside of me says: if you are better you will succeed.

Improvement: I believe that Software Strategy, and those who work for and with it, can benefit from adding this feedback loop. We can see how things work in our own practice and feed it into the training and consulting we do.

Thats the Why, but What?

To start off with we are focusing on the object oriented languages, specifically C++, Java and C#. We intend to provide requirements analysts, project management, coding and testing, i.e. full cycle. This might not be the fashionable end of development but it is where we have common experience and, despite fashion, is still a very active area of development.

We plan to undertake Greenfield projects (i.e. completely new code bases), Brownfield (i.e. enhancing existing products) and Rejuvenation. That last one deserves a few words, if only to say I expect large scale, significant refactoring, to be involved.

There are a lot of code bases out there which remind me of crippled Starship Enterprise, the Engineers are shouting “She cannae take it Captain” - well actually, they are probably saying “Technical debt, technical debt, technical debt…. can’t modify this system” and the more they say it the more the business switches off to engineering.

I, we, believe that it is possible to turn these systems around. We have the technology - or rather the tools and experience.

Anyway, as Software Strategy Development Partners proceeds I hope to have some interesting things to blog about. (And yes, there is a strategy map of business patterns in my notebook.)

So, if you have any work you’d like to sub-contract you know where we are.