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Attending Grady Booch's 2007 Turing Lecture on "The Promise, the Limits and the Beauty of Software" made me realise that, during all our recent deliberations on what Sumac actually sells and how best to communicate that, we've neglected to talk about one of our key attributes. Sumac develops really good software.

The reason for this is very clear. We don't think our clients are, or indeed should be, particularly interested in software. All they need to know is that it meets the needs of their business.

Over the past few years we have designed, built and developed on-line applications to plan journeys on Sheffield's Supertram network, locate PayPoint agencies across the UK and Ireland, create and conduct market research Halo surveys and form on-line trading communities through The Peoples Web. More recently our efforts have focused on development of our own on-line application allowing people to manage their own company websites (CMS).

The complexity of this software varies significantly but certain principles remain:

• The most beautiful software is so simple and transparent it is almost invisible
• Software often has to meet requirements that are not known until it has been developed
• It is as important to bear in mind what software should not do as what it should do
• A good development process should reduce complexity, not increase it
• Software must be good enough but not strive to be perfect (this may seem odd but ask me and I'll explain)

Although the above is only inspired by Grady's talk and he may or may not agree entirely, he did say "Software development has been, is, and will remain fundamentally hard", which we at Sumac like. 

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