Presentation from Great Lakes Software Excellence Conference 2013

1. My Adventure Building a
Quality Software Shop
Stephen Anderson
stephen@bendyworks.com
@bendycode @bendyworks
http://bendyworks.com

2. Why Quality?
• Quality isn’t the point
• I pursue tenfold improvements in
effectiveness
• Pursuing speed vs. pursuing quality

3. Why a Company?
• I made my wife cry
• the solution was entrepreneurship
• I left my comfort zone
• expanding that comfort zone
• Bendyworks is the eventual result of
combining passion with these
entrepreneurial experiences

4. Bendyworks
• How we started Bendyworks

5. Bendyworks
• Ruby on Rails
• Front end development
• Design
• iOS
• Clojure

6. Bendyworks
• An experiment in
doing software
“right”

7. Extreme Programming
& Agile
• Risk Mitigation
• Process over Product
• Feedback Loops
• Pair Programming

8. Bendyworks
• Growing the best
development team we
can

9. 3Values
• Embrace the customers’ goals
• Trust the individual’s judgement
• Provide an environment for success

10. Growth Days

11. Slack
• Systems with slack are:
• more predictable
• longer lasting
• higher quality

12. Slack
• People with slack in their workload:
• are more energetic
• don’t burn out
• have more fun
• do higher quality work

13. It’s not about me
• as the business grows, it ceases to be about the
founders
• it’s about the team
• let go of roles and responsibilities over time
• this makes your team and your business more
robust
• upside: you get to choose roles

14. Negotiation Mistakes
• letting a small project on a handshake turn
large with no contract
• under-estimating
• allowing a time and materials project turn
into fixed bid
• repeating the last mistake multiple times

15. Client Communication
Mistakes
• insufficient client communication
• continuing work in the face of insufficient
client communication
• continuing with a client who argues against
quality and our practices

16. Most valuable word:
“no”

17. Financial Strategies
• Quality before finances
• yes, this is a catch-22
• Have options and always being able to say
"no"
• cash reserves
• charge a bit less than maximum
• Company finances before Owner finances

18. Don’t Grow for
Growth’s Sake

19. Growing a Business
• series of sticker shocks
• series of calculated risks

20. GrowingYour Business
• A business is a financial engine
• This is very different from earning a
salary
• I’d sooner grow my business 30% than my
take home pay
• Let your business grow exponentially
• Your take home pay will grow as an echo

21. Serendipity
• co-working

22. Serendipity
• concerts

23. Q&A
(please provide feedback as well)
Stephen Anderson
http://speakerrate.com/speakers/2657
stephen@bendyworks.com
@bendycode @bendyworks
http://bendyworks.com