First Post

This article was submitted by William, and is designed to give you an insight into our team and workplace.

The IT Team

First things first, “us”…

The Development and QA teams are from varied professional backgrounds (such as Mining, Finance Sector, Retail, Transport, and Gaming) as well as places of origin (QLD, VIC, NSW, UK, China and even exotic NZ). This “rich mix” has lead to good balance and experience coverage on design and support tasks.

MaxSoft encourage skill and knowledge development, so most of us are undertaking MSCE courses (partially during work hours and with paid for online courseware). Others are furthering education via University (ie Masters Degree).

We are a small group (under 20) most of us located in the one area – which allows for problems to be solved / discussed quickly and without the need of excessive emails! We do occasionally work offsite.

We all get along pretty well – except for the Games/LAN nights when we show no mercy :) These are every few months, and are additional to the regular company social activities.

The Environment

OK, the gear and stuff we use…

Typical Developer Kit is;

H/W: Core 2 Duo 3.0Ghz +, 2GB RAM, Dual 19” LCD Screens
OS: MS Server 2003 or XP (A few copies of Vista on test VMs)

Tools & Languages

MS-Visual Studio 2008 [C# and Web (Services, Forms)]
MS-Visual Studio 2005 [C# & VB.NET, ASP.NET]
MS-Visual Studio 2003 [C# & VB.NET, ASP.NET]
Some of us even have a copy of VB6 for legacy systems
nUnit
RhinoMocks
FxCop for coding standards
WATiN for web testing

Databases

MS-SQLServer 2000 & 2005
MySQL
PostGreSQL

Some of us have “natural keyboards” some view this as very un-natural.
Some of use wear head phones and play music whilst we work. The others throw things (usually rubber balls) to get peoples attention.

We are developing a new build and test server, running VMWare ESX, running CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild , nUnit, nCover, FxCop, memory profilers, WIX and other tools.

We take peer reviews very seriously (this is as close to pair programming we feel is necessary), and have a QA department which is part of IT.

The Systems

What we do….
• Payments web service channel (for a number of branded payment types – Rent, Strata Levies, Schools)
• Windows client based Strata Manager Office software
• Donation web service channel
• We write banking software for the banking services we provide

The Future

Where we are going….

New systems are being constructed now and some major ones just around the corner. Our life is not a static one.

We strive for generic approaches for extensibility.

The new framework platform we are targeting is in essence;

• 2008 .Net C# 3.5 (including lots of method extenders)
• nHibernate and nVelocity for the code gen and back end
• Targets Microsoft SQL Server / PostgreSQL / MySQL database
• Mostly Active Record with some domain concepts thrown in
• Lots of custom libraries to speed up development and maintenance