The Story So Far...

A two-week contract was signed with a large telecommunication company in San Diego and as Qualiteers officially started on Wednesday 1-Feb-06, I was on my first ever American trip by Friday 3-Feb-06. Two weeks later, it was announced that the site would suffer massive layoffs, unrelated with the training sessions, I’m sure. At that time Qualiteers only offered 3-hour training sessions (we call them QuickTick nowadays.) and every now and then there was one participant who just didn’t get it. It irritated me that out of eight people one didn’t appreciate the method enough to even try it during the three hours. Later on I’ve realized that three hours just wasn’t enough and there needs to be more theory, more examples, more structure in the exercises and more attitude.

A couple of months later I managed to secure a one-week gig in Paris, France. This came through an old Nokia acquaintance who I happened to meet at CeBIT exhibition in Hanover in 2006 and who introduced me to the CEO of the company. So in May, Qualiteers went to Paris.

The next months were my first real experiences in sales. It wasn’t easy and it still isn’t. Now I can look back and see that there are many successes behind us and acquiring customers is possible. It is possible, because we have a good product, which we’ve managed to make even better this year by focusing on the 1-day long DayTick sessions. But I digress.

By fall 2006 I had the first Finnish companies lined up to train. The training sessions went well. Proof of this is that Vertex Systems called me back in early 2007 to train the rest of their personnel. We must have done something right.

It was in year 2006 that I had my first writing published. I had pitched an article in May already, but it was already September when editing started and the piece “Happy Are the Software Engineers...” appeared as Last Word in the December 2006 issue of Better Software magazine. I almost couldn’t believe how well everything had gone.

In 2007 I turned my focus towards research and sent a theoretical paper on Tick-the-Code to Software Quality Professional journal. The first peer review round rejected the paper with much needed criticism. I took the opportunity to improve my writing and went through all the remarks noting especially the misunderstandings of the reviewers. Because the method is innovative, it requires an unusual way of thinking, which the reviewers weren’t accustomed to. The misunderstandings were crucial, because I knew my writing needed to improve. The paper called “Tick-the-Code Inspection: Theory and Practice” was published (with a few annoying typos) in the June 2007 issue of SQP journal. I had officially joined the inspection professionals of the software trade.

The summer was relaxing and July gave us the possibility to visit Russia for the first time ever. In October I went to present my second paper on the PNSQC conference in Portland, Oregon. By the end of the year we scored another country, Sweden in December. The country tally went up to six and the number of trained software professionals had reached 461.

January 2008 was filled with marketing and sales activities only to be slightly interrupted by the second anniversary of Qualiteers. Thank you to all supporters, customers, partners and friends alike! There’s still much more to be expected!