I thought I’d put together a manifesto of sorts that describes our beliefs and the corresponding features in Contour.
Every Project is unique
By making artifacts completely customizable we’ve enabled companies to define their own process. Therefore Contour can adapt to your process rather than the tool forcing your team to adapt.
The whole team matters
A team is [...]
Contour’s cross project linking allows a project to reference a requirement in a separate project.
Several clients had requested the ability to link requirements (or any items for that matter) across different projects. During analysis we realized that there were several possible implementations.
One option was to completely link an item from one project into another, such [...]
Learn from our experiences in building Contour!
Early on in the development of Contour two of our key requirements was it had to be web based with a intuitive and usable interface. This lead us down the path of Ajax which has been a challenging, fun and I’ll go so far as to say a revolutionizing [...]
Day two for me was all about focusing on dojo and DWR seeing as how that is what we’ve been using in Contour. The day started off with an intro to dojo which was a good overview. Alex Russell is a fantastic speaker and represents dojo very well. If anything, the talk at least gave [...]
Arrived late last night and with a solid 4 hours of sleep head into the first day at The Ajax Experience. My presentation is this afternoon at 5:15 when I’ll be sufficiently worn out.
Just finished the keynote with Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. In summary they gave a rousing tribute to the reasoning behind having [...]
Our own Derwyn Harris will be speaking at The Ajax Experience on October 23rd in Boston. Derwyn will be talking about reengineering Java applications using Ajax.  You can read more about the presentation at the Ajax Experience Website.
This is also the story of building Contour, our requirements management tool as we evolved from a JSP [...]
There is a bit of irony in building a tool without a tool. It’s like building a table for a workbench so you can then build a table. So far we have been very efficient in our process of building our Requirements Management tool. We have a small team, with white boards and a wiki. [...]
This article states that “developer misunderstandings of user requirements are the leading cause of defects in software.” I do believe the developer should be better connected to the actual requirement. However even when using different methodologies, like Agile, there can be a disconnect. Documentation, conversations, phone calls, meetings after meetings all take place before the [...]
In the early stages of product development a major decision for us was what technology to use. There are many considerations such as distribution, how the product will be used and by whom. In my opinion it tends to come down to two things. Desktop vs web based. Obviously Desktop has many advantages when it [...]