Good Software Takes Ten Years. I didn’t know that when we started back in 2007, but I’ve come to terms with that rule since then. A lot can change in 9 years. You can go from the first commit of an internal project released as open-source to a small, independent, self-funded software team that is making a difference for 300+ teams in 34 countries around the world.
Did I have a clue about where we’d get in 9 years when I pushed that first commit? Most definitely not. Was I confident that we’d be working with 1,000s of InfoSec experts every day when I quit my security consulting job over 2 years ago to concentrate my efforts on Dradis Pro full time? Not even close. Do we have a clue about where we’re heading over the next 2 years? We have clues but most likely, we really don’t know. But that’s fine, we’re not alone in this journey. We’re bringing our entire community along with us. And most importantly, we have the freedom to choose where we’re heading.
We don’t have investors so we can keep our users front and center. Were trying to grow as slowly as possible. By focusing on the fundamentals, we’ve managed to get this far. And, we’re sticking to the same approach going forwards: do the work, keep our users happy, and care about their long term success.
A brief history of our project
Just to put things into perspective, here is what working on the same piece of software every single day for 9 years did:
- Dec 2007: Start working on an internal tool for pentest collaboration.
- Jan 2008: Release Dradis Framework as open-source.
- …3,000 code commits.
- Jul 2011: Launch a side-business offering additional functionality and official support (Dradis Professional announcement).
- …work with 140 teams, 17 new releases, 2,967 commits.
- Feb 2014: Make the side-business our main business.
- …7 new releases, 782 commits.
- Mar 2015: Welcome Rachael, our second full-time member of the team
- …13 new releases, 2,503 commits…
The last 12 months
With the growth in the Dradis Pro side of things, we have been able to reinvest a lot of man-hours in Dradis Community Edition. It’s our way to give back to the community that helped us along the way. The code was refreshed and updated. Many of the enhancements that were created for the Pro edition were backported to CE. Plus, the documentation was rewritten, step-by-step guides were created, and screencasts were recorded. We also created and released OWASP, PTES, HIPAA and OSCP compliance packages with testing checklists, report templates and more.
The activity in the Dradis CE repo shows how a lot of this effort was concentrated earlier in the year to sync the CE and Pro code bases (kudos to the GitLab team for the inspiration).
Our community is growing stronger than ever. We’re averaging 400 git clones each week. Plus, we have a thriving Slack channel and dozens of new threads in our community forums.
What we are going to be focusing on over the next 12 months
Over the last 12 months, we’ve pushed 11 new releases of Dradis Pro. From performance and interface to functionality and stability, we’ve noticeably improved every single aspect of the app. The product today is in a completely different category from where it was 12 months ago. And still, there is so much room to grow, refine, and improve!
2017 is exciting for us in many ways. We’re now working with over 300+ teams. This is a challenge, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. Plus, this the first time that we have a small team of very talented people working full time on taking care of product development and user experience.
I’m sure that the speed at which we’ll be making progress is going to feel break-neck. I can’t wait to see the things that we’re going to be able to build with you and for you and the rest our community.
To our best year ever,
Daniel
