If you look at the figure below, what was the first thing that came to your mind..? Take ten seconds to formulate an answer.

I bet it wasn’t: “Thats a great mockup from a functional design about 3D-modelling in Google Earth”? But, as you might’ve guessed by now, that’s exactly what it is. What I’ve tried to do just now is try to expand your beliefs about what a “mockup” could be. For me software design is about taking the invisible and making it visible and that’s rule #1 from Test Driven Requirements engineering (TDR).

Read more: Test Driven Requirements: Rule #1 Visualize the Design

In this article we will give an historical review of the rise and fall of a large scale sports message broker platform and how it was replaced by a solution that was orders of magnitude simpler. The intended audience for this article is mixed. The start of this article describes the problem and does not assume any in-depth technical knowledge. The paragraph describing the solution contains technical elements and assumes some technical affinity with the reader. The platform was installed in 2004 and finally “de-plugged” by Dexels in 2010.

Download the PDF or continue reading online.

Read more: Deprecating a million euro message broker

For years I have been impressed by the nice page peel effect as seen in numerous online flash applications used to display product folders or other types of documents. Never have I found a good explanation on how this effect is achieved, let alone detailed instructions on how to reproduce this myself. Sparked by Chet and Romains brilliant book “Filthy Rich Clients” I ventured out to create a filthy rich feature myself. For me this was the obvious choice.

Read more: Java page peel effect

Computer magazine AppWorks just published series one of a two-part about "Test Driven Requirements engineering", the article written by our functional designer and tester Johan van Seijen.

Read the publication here, the original here or visit the website of AppWorks.