Sharing success with HN:

Yesterday, my boss called me to say, the project you were building looks to be over and we would like if the team shifts to new projects. This is after our project processes over 100,000 image based financial transactions every day in one of the top 3 markets of the world.

I am thrilled to share this success and what exactly made us complete the job. I work as a senior manager in a software development team that developed the application suite.

First, the team:

The project has 8 different, big software (some Windows desktop and rest Web (mark W) applications. It has taken us 4 years to build but with only a programmer staff of 8-9 with no tester. The programmer had an average experience of 2-3 years (we could afford only this small experience) and no domain experience.

The only thing that succeeded here is my emphasis to make every programmer a product manager for the product he oversees. This programmer has a free run but complete responsibility of the product. He is present in every SDLC phase all the time. I have never indulged in the efforts he is taking but the outcome he is achieving. I emphasized over the thrill of building something awesome.

Second and equally important:

We used Microsoft stack. We don't use any thing other than bare minimum Microsoft to build our products. We don't use any version management system and testing tools. We have never tweaked the IIS, MS SQL server. We have used it the way it has been given by software manufacturer.

There is nothing like Microsoft products when it comes to "It works - with minimum effort". What we think of Apple in terms of hardware products is true of Microsoft for software development products.

I use Linux for my personal aspirations and love my hacking. But, when it comes to building mission critical applications in short time with a small bunch of staff, I must admit Linux is no small job, though Linux comes entirely free.