If you have to spend St Patrick's Day at a software process conference in San Jose, you might as well break out the shamrock and Guinness and have a party. That's what the fledgling Galway-based software company aimware did in 1997. The hard-headed Irish hospitality paid handsome dividends, with aimware making crucial contacts: a strategic partner in the ETEC consultancy plus important customers in Boeing and Mutual Insurance of Omaha. Initiative and drive like this helped aimware to win the Irish Software Association's young software company of the year award.
Aimware, from its offices in Galway and Boston, produces two aimware software products - aimfirst and aimstep - which help to automate software development. The process of creating software is plagued by lack of control: inadequate documentation, reliance on "gurus" who won't write anything down, incompatible versions of programs and, not least, rapidly-breeding "bugs". Aimware founder and chief executive Eamon McGuinness compares his company's products to Intuit's Quick Books. The latter deals with invoices; aimware deals with software deliverables. "It's all about not losing control," says McGuinness.
The programs impose control: aimstep allows tracking of requirements, tests and defects (okay, bugs) and aimfirst enables management of the overall project. Indeed, aimfirst could be applied in non-software projects although it is not yet marketed outside the software community. Unlike bureaucratic development methodologies like SSADM, aimware has adopted a more flexible approach. A subset of the software's functions can be used at first, allowing the user to grow into it, project by project. McGuinness emphasises that a user can start with bug control only and move on to testing and requirements control as experience grows. This is exactly how Jean Flanagan of AIB is using aimware; she says it is being introduced gradually, replacing home-grown, labour-intensive tracking methods such as keying project data into a Microsoft Access database.
The aimware story began in late 1995 with McGuinness, having left Digital's European Software Development Centre in Galway, doing what he calls "a bit of navel-gazing". He did a "brain-dump" of ideas onto a sheet of paper and a definite philosophy took shape. He decided to avoid software consultancy, however lucrative, and instead to develop a unique product and market it aggressively.
There are now three cornerstones to the philosophy, he says. Firstly, the software evolves constantly in line with customers' demands. At the beginning, liaison with Telecom Eireann and Motorola, the earliest clients, drove aimware's development. This approach continues, with Kodak and Dun and Bradstreet the latest clients to influence aimware's evolution. Secondly, the emergence of software standards in the late 1980s was crucial, giving a fixed target for products such as aimware. The company says it markets the first integrated package for the implementation of software best practices, as required by the SEI CMM standard (Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model, to you and me). McGuinness's ambition is not modest: "With this lead, aimware can be the Intuit of the software development and test world."
Jane Durnin of Kindle Banking Systems emphasises the importance for Kindle of meeting the ISO 9000 quality standard for software. To achieve ISO 9000, she uses aimware for the internal and external standards audit. Aimware tracks all failures to meet the standard and, by keeping strict logs, ensures that all defects are remedied.
The third cornerstone is that aimware employees must "make themselves redundant in the short term". McGuinness practised what he preached and moved from doing the initial programming to quality control, marketing and management. Other employees are expected to move in the same way as the company grows.
How did aimware secure finance to get started? With great difficulty, actually. In the absence of any encouragement from the banks in 1996, it relied on Telecom Eireann paying for deliverables piecemeal. The Ulster Bank's BES fund came up with a loan of £250,000 in 1997 but, apart from that, aimware's growth had to be self-financed. Steady nerves were needed until sales started to flow during 1998. McGuinness says the lack of venture capital is a major reason for the dearth of Irish software start-ups.
Successful small software companies can expect predatory interest from the big boys, and three have already expressed interest. McGuinness says it is far too early to consider ending the adventure. The aimware team is looking forward to its next user group meeting, which may well take place near its Galway headquarters in the mardi gras atmosphere of race week in June. They won't need any shamrock, but the Guinness might be flowing again.