Welcome to my fresh new blog that will focus on software development and requirements management.  I’m going to be clearing up my online history over the next while – so many started blogs and good intentions that came to nothing.  This place will be my place online for the next while, hopefully you’ll enjoy reading along with my trials and tribulations.

A little bit about me, I’ve been developing business software for about 12 years, the last 8 as a consultant (UK Contractor).  Along with software development, I’ve worked as a business analyst and a requirements change analyst.  The combination of these two related but different roles has opened my eyes to software development from both a programmer’s point of view and from a customer’s point of view.

I intend to use this experience to develop my own piece of software – codename Bliss – it’ll be used by me for requirements analysis and data analysis, but I intend to ensure that it’s not limited to my particular area, it will be a general purpose tool for working with complex datasets.  It’s not designed to replace excel, word or oracle, but it certainly will live somewhere in the spaces between all of those applications.

This means that I’m going to be growing my one man consultancy business to also sell software.  My first job was for a small software house where I was responsible for distributing disks to customers (yeah, it was a while ago, ok!).  I’m not 100% on the software business side of things, but I’m willing to give it a go.

Biggest problem I perceive at the moment is one of positioning, how can I market a brand new app that will be generally useful and which has potential to become a new genre?  Is it a development tool?  Is it a platform?  Is it a product?  Should I market it as a requirements management tool?  I intend to seek the answers to these questions as I undertake the development of the software.

I’ll probably mention people and places I’ve worked over the years, if you’re mentioned and you’d rather not be, let me know.