I was planning on attending and contributing to Barcamp – Ireland, but it turns out I’m going to see LegoLand in Windsor with my kids instead, sorry folks!

These are rules I’ve gathered in my head over the past ten years. I can’t claim ownership of them all and I’m sure they have been articulated in many other places. A conversation at lunchtime about how hard it is to do commercial software development prompted me to do a brain dump.

By commercial software development I mean making a piece of software in order to sell it to many customers (as opposed to a handful) or to provide a service used by many customers.

1. 100-1: This a good ratio of end-users to developers to aim for as a starting point. With less than this you don’t get feedback and the feedback you do get will tend to take you in strange directions. Remember if you build a stadium you have to fill it every weekend to make a return, software works off similar ratios.
2. Build it – Then Sell it: The corollary sell it, then build it, is a different business, called consultancy. A Consultancy business doesn’t scale the way a software business does because you build a different product for each customer and sales is related to the number of associates you can recruit to do the heavy lifting. Building it means finding a niche and timing it just right so that the market is ready for your product. Irish software companies can build the stuff but their timing is usually off (they often suffer from being too early).
3. 6 months – 12 months: It takes 6 months to build anything worthwhile and it takes another 6 months to raise the quality to the level where you can let it out of the house without a curfew. But what if I hire really great people, I hear you say? Well if you hire really great people, then their and your ambitions will be greater too, so you end up building something more complicated which takes 6 months…
4. Show and Tell: Get the development team to demonstrate progress every week, by running a demo of the current code base. If they miss a week, then make doubly sure you get a full demo the following. Do it from a full install of the kit, not a development environment.
5. Build the Installer first: Installers keep you honest, stop you fudging development problems with patches, isolate you from the development environment and force integration early.
6. Project Plans are good: Microsoft project gets a lot of stick (and I’ve given it some myself in the past) but I can’t think of a better tool for giving you a ball park view of how long a piece of work is going to take. See a future post for how I plan. Remember the map is not the terrain, the best value of a plan is to be able to assess when half the time is gone, whether half the work is done.
7. Using is Testing: Unit test suits are good, automated test suites are good, user acceptance test suites are good, but there is no substitute for sitting down and using the product. Better still, get somebody else outside the team to sit down a use the product. One hour watching a novice user with a new piece of software is worth 24 hours of automated test.
8. Don’t extend the date – cut the features: You have to ship it, otherwise you end up like Vista or worse DECnet Phase V, constantly revising your feature set to meet changing customer requirements. XP has lots to say about this and its prioritisation mechanisms allow you to make cuts easily.
9. Fire the asshole:You have a team, its working pretty well, you have this one super guy, but hes a bit of an asshole, rubs people the wrong way, gets abusive when asked for help, schedules, dates etc. Get rid of him. Software development is a team activity.
10. Its a marketing function: Commercial software development is about supplying a customer’s unmet needs and/or desires. Its not about J2EE, Spring, Web-Services, Python, C#, Design patterns etc. etc. That is software engineering which is a sub-discipline of commercial development.

I read in the Sunday newspapers that Marrakech was flogged recently. They raised over €75millon during the boom years and beyond. I always used to like my friend Conor’s quote (he was head of strategic alliances there),

At Marrackech I learned how to add a lot of cost into a business and then I learned how to take it back out again.

I somehow feel they didn’t quite make the 10x multiple that VCs hope for when they invest…

I recently received an invite to participate in the Google for your domain service. This is a Google email account and calendar that can be given a specific domain identity. In our case the identity was for secantus.com (soon to be putplace.com). During the beta period you get 25 free email accounts, a management console and a calendar for each user.

Setup consists of updating your existing MX records to point to the Google Mail Servers.  Its slickly done and tells you whether you have configured them right or not. You can brand the interface replacing the Gmail logo with your own and of course you get a free IM client (GTalk) to boot.

We’ve been using it for the past week and are more than happy with the service. The only issues to date are with the Gmail Notifier program which doesn’t recognise hosted email accounts (it expects an @gmail.com account). This has been reported on the Google feedback forums.

One nice touch, when you sent email through another client (e.g. Apple Mail or Thunderbird) it appears in your sent items on the gmail hosted account, sweet!

Techcrunch reports that BlogBeat has been acquired by Feedburner. I have used BlogBeat for the past few months and love its simple and intuitive stats. Its also real-time unlike Google Analytics.

Well done Jeff!

FYI : Blogbeat is a stats package for bloggers that you can actually understand.

David McWilliams deflates our wealth illusion, with a salutary comparison with the property bubble in Japan,

A good example was the fact that in 1988 the land on which the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo sits was valued at more than the entire real estate of the State of California or Canada – the world’s second largest country. By that benchmark, Japan was indeed the wealthiest country in the world. Needless to say, it was all nonsense – not because the Japanese were not wealthy, they were; but the property bubble (which burst in 1990 with dire consequences) had overstated that wealth enormously. The Japanese had income which had been built up over generations from making stuff, but they were not as wealthy as they thought they were.

David goes on to state that when the bubble burst at least the Japanese had a wealth creation industry (manfacturing) to fall back on, what will we do when the so called softlanding catapults us out of our seats and into the aeroplane bulkhead?

We moved house recently and this prompted me to investigate an alternative to my existing broadband supplier (Eircom). I rang NTL last week had a pleasant conversation with with an Irish sales guy who gently persuaded me to ugrade to NTL digital to boot (ok, I was kind of planning to at some point so he caught me in a softened up state).

The NTL man arrived on Tuesday and with a bit of tinkering on my part I had broadband connected all over the house  via wireless by 6.00pm. Its the standard package  (3mb download, €30 a month) and according to the Irish ISPtest its about the same speed as my €45 a month Eircom package.

Two nice touches,

• They texted me to remind me that the guy was coming the day before he was due to arrive.
• I had a problem when I first connected so I followed the instructions taped to the top of the cable modem (power off PC, power off modem, turn on modem wait 30 secs, turn on PC) for a laugh, and hey presto it worked!

Good job NTL…

Om Malik reports on the incredible synchronicity between the Apple and Google Stock prices.

…Heatseek, (via techcrunch) a porn focused browser , I guess its the oldest money making business on the Internet…

A firm candidate for the the Darwin Awards climbed over two fences and worked her way through dense foliage in order to stick her hand through a link fence into the Amur Tiger enclosure at Dublin zoo. The tiger then did what Tiger’s do and tried to eat her.

The 16 year old girl somehow escaped the Tiger’s clutches and is in a stable condition in hospital.