About Us
Torq Software is a small software development company located north of Perth, Western Australia. We focus on developing and maintaining software products rather than adhoc projects and prefer to work closely with business partners on a long term basis. Our Clients are often also our business partners. We have expertise in a variety of technologies and have developed and maintain a number of product and product suites. The following category list provides more information about us as a company, how we develop software and do business.
Sentient Computing
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- Parent Category: About Us
- Category: Our Clients
Sentient Computing is a specialist process automation company focused on being responsive, attentive and delivering quality automation software and services to our clients. Sentient has a strong customer base within the Coal, Oil, Gas, Mining, Production, Transportation, Environmental and Power Industries, both in Australia and around the globe. Sentient's success is result of delivering customisable and unique process automation software to clients, augmented with highly responsive engineering and support services.
We develop and maintain the MacroView, PlantVantage and StradaX product suites for Sentient. Sentient has a respectable client list which includes Wesfarmers CSBP, Bluescope Steel, Northparkes, Golden Circle, Public Transport Authority (WA), Tay Ninh Sugar Factory (Vietnam), Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd, Queensland Transport, Iluka Resources, Xstrata, Coogee Chemicals, Railcorp NSW, Rio Tinto, Carpentaria Gold, Certain Teed (USA), AGL, Loy Yang Power, Milne Agrigroup, Worsley Alumina, Spectrum Systems (USA), Georgia Power (USA), Bristol Water Plant (USA) and Arizona Chemical (USA). Software developed and maintained by Torq Software has been running continuously and providing value for these Customers for many years. Some installations are systems that have been running for over 15 years.
Agile Principles
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- Parent Category: About Us
- Category: What We Believe
We believe that the use of Agile Principles in Software Development provides significant benefits to all the stakeholders in the development process. The core principles were set out by a group of software development luminaries whose goal is to uncover better ways of developing software. This is covered in the Agile Manifesto which can be found at www.agilemanifesto.org. These agile principles act as a practical pragmatic guide for how software development is performed. They promote the de-emphasis of aspects of the software development process that though important, can de-rail the actual end goal of working useful software.
| Though work processes and tools are important...
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Individuals and Interactions are more important. | In other words, the quality of the people that are working and their willingness to achieve a goal together is more important than the work processes and tools they use. We deliver software early and often as part of our typical development process. It gets the software in your hands quickly and allows you to |
| Though comprehensive documentation is important....
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Working software is more important. | There is no point having detailed documentation if the software being documented is not operational and working. |
| Though contract negotiation is important...
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Customer collaboration is more important. | Arguing over the finer points of a contract that probably doesn’t define what is needed in totality wastes everyone’s time. It’s far more effective to be practical and work together towards a goal that may change during a project. |
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Though following a plan laid out at the beginning of a project is important....
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Responding to change is more important. | This is similar in intent to the quote from Eisenhower:
Plans are worthless. Planning is essential. Yes, we need to plan up front, but it’s more important to be able to learn as you get into a project and adjust to new information and understanding as it is made available or uncovered. |
Partnering with Businesses
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- Parent Category: About Us
- Category: What We Do
A strategy of Torq Software is to enter into long term partnerships with businesses to develop and maintain software products. The partner business provides the business domain expertise while we provide the software development expertise. Our strategic partners get lower software development rates and a long term commitment to the software products. We can then leverage software development resources across a number of business partners in differing business areas.
This approach has been taken with both the MacroView product range and the Iris Debt Collection product range. In one case the business model is based on product sales whilst the other is based on transactions or jobs. The business models for a product or product range is designed to achieve a win-win for all parties involved and to practically maintain the product over the anticipated product lifetime.
Software Development is Expensive
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- Parent Category: About Us
- Category: What We Believe
In our opinion Software Development is an expensive exercise. This is balanced by the huge benefits that can arise when the right software is applied to an appropriate business or organizational context. Putting in a statement like "Software Development is expensive" doesn't help sell our services.
But... development software is expensive. It takes:
- Technical skill
- The ability to deal with immense complexity
- Significant time
- Attention to detail
Regardless, organizations around the world spend multiple billions of dollars every year on developing new software. They do this because:
- The payoff in automating mundane repetitive tasks previously done by people is immense
- Once software is developed, the costs to reproduce it are negligible.
It's this latter point that can really confuse people in how to deal with software development. Most people, in their daily lives, just deal with:
- off-the-shelf, such as Microsoft Word
- free software, such as the Linux operating system
- free services, such as the Google search engine
The cost of these types of software, or the fact that they are free to the end-user, hides the expense of the initial software development and ongoing maintenance. Microsoft sells Microsoft Word for a few hundred dollars a copy because they sell in such high volumes. Google provides free search services, because they can get advertisers to pay. Open source software developers work on free software for a variety of reasons.
Our bottom line is that:
if you can get off-the-shelf software, free software or free services to achieve what you need, then... you don't need software development services
But...off the shelf, free software or free services doesn't always do exactly what your business or organization needs. This combined with the huge benefits software can provide; mean that software development can make financial sense for many businesses or organizations. If you have a scenario where benefits of automating your workflow potentially outweigh the cost of developing custom software then you should talk to us.
Visual Touchscreens
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- Parent Category: About Us
- Category: What We Do
Visual Touchscreens is a separate company started by the principal of Torq Software to research and develop new ways of working with computers. Its Touch Computing for all of your displays... including the ones you can't touch.
Check it out. Its interesting and valuable work for the future of computing. The easiest way to get up to speed on the concept is to view the videos available on the site. The introduction video is shown below. As this is new technology an email address may be requested depending on the video being displayed.
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Who We Are
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What We Do
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How We Work
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What We Believe
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Our Clients
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