InGeniusBlog.com

If you have a look through our web site, you’ll notice that InGenius is “two things” - a Software Engineering firm, and a Professional Services (or Consulting) firm. Does that make sense?

Turns out to be a really good thing for us to do. We’re all about smart people. We’ve been in the business of finding smart people since 1993, and we now have about 15,000 people in our database. Whether we’re designing a cool new phone and associated PC application for one of our clients, or whether we’re putting a team of people together for a government organization to build a new online application, what we’re always doing is: understanding exactly what our clients want to get done, and putting together the right people to GET it done, creatively, well, and fast. Good developers, good UI people, good support people, . . . our folks are what we’re all about. We know how to find and assess good folks, because we’ve been in the software development business for ages. We’ve run software product companies ourselves (that’ll be another blog entry), and we know what we need to do to produce high quality commercial software that’s deployable, supportable, useable and maintainable.

And of course, the amount of fun we have seems to be directly proportional to the smartness of our people - turns out smart and funny overlap after all!

So InGenius continues to develop products and systems in-house for customers who want to accelerate their own product development, and we continue to find good people to do contract work with the government and high-tech sectors. We’ve been doing it since 1986, through market upturns and downturns, and I’m glad to say upturns again - business is growing for us in both software engineering and consulting. For us, it’s all about people, and having both lines of business has been a smart thing to do.

Here at InGenius, we’re wiki people. We’ve adopted Ward’s Wiki technology, and use it throughout our company.

• When you submit a resume to our company, it automatically ends up in an internal wiki.
• When we start a new project, we start a wiki on day one.
• We track ideas, project plans, business plans, etc on various wiki’s.
• We do product FAQ’s using a wiki.
• And, my personal home page is run using a wiki.

So, what’s a wiki???
Basically, it’s a web page that you can edit simply by clicking on an “Edit” link, or sometimes, by double-clicking on the web page. The page text opens up in a big text box on screen, and you edit by simply typing the text you want to put on the page. There’s a simple wiki language - which varies from one wiki implementation to the next, which allows you to specify links, text formatting, build tables, etc. Here’s a nice description, from wikipedia. Anyone can edit any page! (you can lock pages if you want) You can edit your web site from anywhere!

Check it out! Here’s some cool wiki’s:

• Wikipedia (a huge wiki encyclopedia)
  
• Backback (a newcomer with an awesome UI)
• Meatball Wiki (One of the oldest wikis)
  
• FlexWiki (A Microsoft opensource project (!))
  
• Jot (Cool, and still in beta)
  
• Open Wiki (We use a massively modified version of this in house)

We installed our new bug tracking system last week, and are thrilled to pieces! We ended up getting FogBugz - which has pretty good reviews and a nice feature set. (And is created by Joel of Joel on Software fame…)

One of the things I liked about it is that it doesn't force you to obey a bunch of rules when entering bugs. The FogBugz people, like myself, feel that it is better to get the bug into the system, than to have dozens of little fields that have to be filled out before the bug is accepted. We're using it for tracking features and new product development as well as bugs in existing systems. It's a LOT nicer than ClearQuest!

Other cool stuff - you can submit bugs by email, it has a built-in discussion board, anonymous users can submit bugs, it creates release notes automatically, and it is very easy to use.

The install went really well - it created the SQL server tables that it needed, added itself to IIS, and created it's background service all without intervention or trouble. I wish all server installs were this easy!