My professional life currently revolves around a software development tool known as OnTime. Last night, we released the beta of OnTime 2005, which is an incredible leap over the functionality provided by OnTime 2004. I am extremely excited and proud of our accomplishment for this new version and want to formally thank Dan Suceava and Jonas Bush, two of the chief Software Engineers who made OnTime 2005 possible.
Today, OnTime is the work result of a team effort by software engineers, product documentation and project management, but it wasn't always that way. OnTime's origins go as far back as 1995, a little over 10 years ago. If you're interested in the story, read on...
Back in 1994, at the beginning of the dot com boom, my college roomate, Bahan Sadegh (now Chief Technology Officer at Time America) and I were itching to start some kind of a software business. We finally talked some investors into giving a couple of college-kids a bunch of money to start a software company with a focus on developing time and attendance applications (the whole story on how we chose time and attendance is a lot longer than that, but that's for a different blog). As we grew our team, we needed a means of tracking who's working on what and I eventually wrote a small multi-user tool in VB that helped us do just that.
Fast forward 6 years. I have left the company I co-founded (due to a variety of reasons that could fill up many blogs) and I was enjoying my career with Microsoft as a Senior Consultant. Microsoft Consultants often work on projects with multiple developers and other participants who are often lead by the most senior consultant. This makes the job of senior consultants more of a project management job than a software development job. But of course, Microsoft customers are not paying $250 an hour for a consultant to work with Microsoft Project all day, so the consultants have to figure out a way to do their project management jobs on the side of software development. For me, Microsoft Project was not going to do it!
As powerful as Microsoft Project is, I've never seen a single software development and testing team whose members all use Microsoft Project. In 99% of the cases, only a handful of people (such as the project manager and some executives) use Project, while the rest of the team provides status reports via email. In the brave few environments where teams have tried to implement Project Server for the whole team to use, it's usually a major disaster because developers and testers hate using Project to update their tasks.
That's where I re-realized in order to be able to deliver my projects on time and on budget, I needed the tool I had once created for my company Vitrix. A simple, multi-user tool to track and report on the status of features and defects. But the original tool had a lot of problems; among them the fact that it was designed with VB and Access and some features weren't well thought-out. I had my chance to redo it in a much better way. I redesigned the tool from scratch and built it using .NET and SQL Server as the core technologies. No more Access, no more FoxPro - this was going to be an Enterprise-capable tool, even if I was going to be the only user. My nights and weekends all-of-a-sudden became booked with writing code. Not knowing what to name the new tool, I chose “OnTime” because of the main purpose of the tool: to help me deliver my projects on time.
It took me 6 months before the nights and weekends produced something that was useful. OnTime V1 was born. Now in it's 5th major release, OnTime is the flagship product of my company, Axosoft. Its success in the software development community (especially in the world of .NET) has been amazing. Nearly 2,000 software development teams in more than 35 countries around the world use the product today. Every day more people use it than the previous day.
With the release of OnTime 2005, we've announced a couple of new products. One is a Customer Portal server that allows software development teams a means for their customers to communicate with them by reporting defects and requesting features through a self-registering web site. The second new product, OnTime Enterprise Server, allows for OnTime users to connect to an OnTime database over the internet through the use of Web Services. Both of these new products are exciting and unique to our field.
There is one other person who's support, encouragement and understanding has made all of this possible. My wife, Lawdan Tehrani Shojaee has had to give up many nights and weekends to help drive the development of OnTime. Thank you!
I'd love to hear your feedback on our product line, our strategy, what you think we should do differently or anything else you want to share with me.