BenCurtis.com

There has been a bit of consternation among developers about the pricing changes to MSDN and the pricing of Team System, and Martin Weber talks about MicroISVs not being on the radar of tool vendors, in light of these pricing discussions. I have to agree that most larger vendors are focusing on selling high-priced tools to larger teams, but I also think there is a trend of MicroISVs themselves coming up with products for the MicroISV.

As an example, I point to Tesly — well, of course I would: if I don't advertise it, who will? :) But anyway, Tesly is priced for all comers. It's free for the lone programmer or small team, cheap for slightly larger teams, and somewhat pricey if you want the word "Enterprise" in the product name.

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I read Markl's Thoughts: Shipping Software and couldn't help but agree with what he was saying. In fact, that's the primary reason I have chosen to focus on web development rather than, say, writing apps for a particular OS: It's so gratifying to code something up, test it, push it out, and suddenly have every user upgraded.

For example, I got a call from my boss yesterday with an idea for a feature for one of our products. I estimated the feature would take no more than a day or two to implement, so we could have that new feature available to all our customers by the end of the week. And our customers won't have to lift a finger to get that new functionality. That's cool.

In related news, this past weekend I rolled out a new minor version of Tesly, the test plan management tool I'm building. Now one can track requirements and tasks associated with building a product.

With the task tracking feature (which still needs some work to be where I want it to be) Tesly is starting to become more of what I want it to be -- a tool that is used to track information throughout the development process. The development manager and the QA manager both have reasons to use this tool, which increases its usefulness to the development organization. Now in one place you can see what requirements are to be satisfied, how long it will take to get the functionality for those requirements completed, what tests are being run to insure the requirements are being met, and any issues (bugs, enhancements, etc.) have arisen from those tests. I'm really enjoying working on this project, and I hope others will find it as useful and interesting as I do.