About Us

We are strong believers in Agile Software Development methodologies and have been successfully using Extreme Programming practices for more than 5 years now. We've read at least a dozen books on the subject and thrive on learning more and more. We have had success on many different projects using the XP methodology and want to share the expertise that we have acquired with our fellow programmers.

We have created ProjectCards to fill in a gap we found in Agile methodologies: we needed a tool that could provide the great benefits of planning using index cards but take out the drawbacks of keeping this precious information on such an archaeic media.

How did this adventure start?

We, founders of ProjectCards, have gained our experience mostly as software engineers in the microelectronics manufacturing industry. We have been developing many different applications ranging from MES to electronic specification sheets applications, including wireless inventory management and RFID tag identification and detection.

Manufacturing environments run 24/7, 365 days a year. Software for this kind of customer needs to be highly reliable, robust, scalable and run without a glitch. All this in an environment wich is constantly changing, adapting to new market opportunities.

Of course, with our growing respective families at home, we didn't want to be on pager all the time. We didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night (our children took care of that) or during the week-end. We gradually, naturally, embraced a culture of tests and quality.

Years and years ago, we were big preachers of BDUF

Big Design Up Front, that's how we learned it at school and in the books. If something went wrong in the development phase, it's because you didn't do enough design up front. Do more! If your customer doesn't like the application, it's because you didn't ask the right questions up front. Do more!

Oh, we made some beautiful monsters. Loads of features, elegant designs -- some of these applications are still running today --, but:

• Projects took too long to deliver.
• We were always in a crunch at the end of the project, the recurring death march.
• We ended up sacrificing the basis of our emerging culture: tests, code review, quality, reliability.
• After we left the projects, our babies were neglected. The design degenerated as more and more patches were added.
• Maintenance got to be horrible; the resulting code was awful. Rewrites often came to be the only viable solution.
• Often times, the original design was great and survived rewrite!

Maintenance is strangling our organisations

Let's face it: just about 80% of developers are stuck on maintenance and they hate their jobs. Of course, they do an awful job because of that! After a couple years, people start saying "Oh well, we'll have to rewrite this application again" as if it was so common it should be generally accepted.

We were dissatisfied with what was going on

Our quest for better quality software came as a series of steps. These steps were the result of the discovery of new techniques, over time.

• Step 1: Iterative, incremental development approaches
  This new approach brought increased communications with the customer. This was great! We finally got feedback for what was done. Much better. Still missing: internal code quality.
• Step 2: JUnit and automated tests
  With automated unit tests, we were finally able to maintain stability in our quality and development velocity.
• Step 3: The Extreme Programming methodology
  Pair programming, continuous integration, short iterations, the Planning Game, the velocity, INDEX CARDS!
• Step 4: ProjectCards
  We found that the Planning Game with index cards was great, but something was missing. We needed reporting facilities for our customers, upper management and for justifying government funding. We also needed to quickly highlight the impact of customer decisions over time.

We needed ProjectCards

As the saying goes, "A fool with a tool is still a fool". ProjectCards is your tool for project management. What you need to make it brilliant is Agile Project Management. BUT, if you are already an "agilist", this tool is the lever that will let you move mountains.