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).

Lees meer: 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.

Lees meer: 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.

Lees meer: 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.

Uncertainty principle in completely successful software development

Because software development is an intrinsically creative process it is expected that uncertainty plays an important role. In this blog post I will discuss an uncertainty principle in developing software.

Before and during a software development process it is not possible to simultaneously minimize the uncertainty of several development criteria.

Lees meer: Uncertainty Principle and Software Development

In this whitepaper we will present a high level overview of various aspects of the Sportlink system that is used by a large number of sports associations in the Netherlands. The main purpose of this white paper is to give the reader a basic understanding of the complexity of the system and to some extent the methodology and architecture that was used to harness this complexity.

Please download the article and tell us what you think.

If you are interested in a design methodology that will greatly reduce the time needed to communicate with your clients and developers, you should learn about Test Driven Requirements engineering. We have written an insightful article about how we at Dexels implement this method into our software implementation projects.

The extended interest that this method gets, merits a blog written in English. We are currently in the process of writing this blog, and gradually translating the Dutch article to English.

The first rule of TDR is to vizualize the design

Read the first blog post in the news section of our site!