Why We Wrote Software We Never Expected to Sell
We were a start-up software testing company, and we were delivering our testing results in word processing documents. But somewhere early on, we got dissatisfied with this method. Our clients had to find some way to keep track of which issues were still open, look through all of the results to find particular ones if they had a question, and didn't have any efficient way to get work in motion as they went along. On our part, we wanted to be able to keep track of issues that needed to be clarified or retested, to efficiently record which operating systems or program versions brought up which issues, and to easily differentiate between, say, a bug and a suggestion for a new feature or a comment on the user interface.
"Well," we said, "We have the programming expertise. Why don't we just write our own? It'll be easy."
Sure, we can laugh about it now. Regardless, we are glad we wrote our own -- although it certainly wasn't easy.
We decided that we didn't want a Windows-based program, even though most of our testing is done on Windows machines. For one thing, we keep our builds clean, and we didn't have to install any extra programs that the testing itself didn't call for. For another thing, we wanted to be sure the program was available to us whatever operating system we were using -- Windows, Mac OS, UNIX, or what have you. And we realized that if we build a Web-based application, we could share information with our clients -- and they could share information across locations -- in real time. So we got to it.
The resulting application, our version 1.0, answered our needs. It gave us issue lists that we could filter practically any way we wanted, and easy report views for things like all issues assigned to testers, or everything that was new in the last twenty-four hours. True, it wasn't particularly pretty, but then, it was just for our own use.
And it worked. Information flowed back and forth. It was easy for us to communicate with our clients, and vice-versa. It saved us time, which brought down costs both for us and our clients. It saved our clients time. It gave us information that would be too troublesome to get otherwise.
But then people started asking us if they could buy it.
"Buy it?" we said. "But we didn't design it to --" Then we stopped and thought. It was a good program. People wanted to use it. And it had been developed by us, people who were in the business of tracking issues with software -- not by a company that just thought it had a good idea for a product. We were using it on all our testing contracts and kept making little fixes and enhancements. Maybe we should shine it up a little and make it available to the world.
"Shining it up a little" turned out to be more involved than we expected. We decided that if we were going to sell it, we wanted it to work more smoothly, to look better, offer better functionality, and be more intuitive. We wanted an integrated HTML-based help system. We wanted the built-in ability to send e-mail and upload screen shots. We wanted a home page where you could click on one link and have all of your new issues right in front of you.
In the midst of this, we researched the program name we had been using (it wasn't "Dragonfly" back then) and found out that a British company had also been using that name for their bug-tracking program, probably longer than we had been using it for ours. Oh well: We just found another name. It took us a while, but we picked "Dragonfly." They get from one place to another easily, they're fast as the Dickens, and they eat bugs. What could be better?
In the end, we put more time into upgrading version 1.0 to version 2.0 than we did into developing version 1.0 in the first place. Then we tested it, cleaned it up, and tested it again, in real-life conditions. We even used Dragonfly to manage the development and testing of Dragonfly!
But now it's ready. Would you like to try it? Click here for a free 30-day demo. It has all of the features and everything; it just expires after 30 days.
Or let us show you around the program: take the tour.
Or, if you want to get up and running with Dragonfly right away, you can either have us set up a Dragonfly database for you, or purchase a copy of the program to host yourself: click here to purchase or subscribe.