AMQP 1.0 Core Features
Robert Godfrey discusses the requirements set at AMQP’s foundation: Applicability, Reliability, Fidelity, Interoperability, Manageability, Ubiquity, explaining how AMQP was designed for the future.
Robert Godfrey discusses the requirements set at AMQP’s foundation: Applicability, Reliability, Fidelity, Interoperability, Manageability, Ubiquity, explaining how AMQP was designed for the future.
Visure Solutions recently announced the availability of IRQA which denotes a solution for requirements definition and management (RDM). A sound process using professional tools is important for ensuring the quality of product and solution development with respect to the requirements specification.
On October 26th, The Jolt Judges announced the awards for 2011 in the category “Design, Planning, and Architecture Tools”. In detail, the Jolt hall of fame now includes the products Paradigm for UML, Restructure 101, and Requirements Center 2010.
Team Foundation Server 11 has added many features in the area of Application Lifecycle Management. Some of the highlights include support for code reviews, iterations/sprints, resource allocation, third part testing frameworks, and a much more capable dependency graph.

One of the main challenges when designing software architecture is the consideration of quality attributes. Not only their design turns out to be difficult, but also the specification of these attributes. Consequently, many problems in software systems are directly related to the specification and design of quality attributes such as modifiability or performance, to name just a few.
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Gojko Adzic has written the book Specification by Example, explaining the set of techniques for describing the functional and behavioural aspects of a computer system in a way that they are useful to the development team (expressed ideally as executable tests), understandable by non-technical stakeholders and maintainable to remain relevant despite changing customer demands.

Unprecedented levels of change caused by the pace of innovation are stretching traditional contract models to the breaking point. As more organizations adopt Agile and Lean for the development of innovative/complex products and services, new contract models are needed that accommodate change. The Evolutionary Contract Model, based on Agile / Lean principles, offers promise as a possible solution.
Mario Cardinal explains how to use agile practices to incrementally introduce non-functional requirements into the architecture in order to reduce the complexity of the solution.

Traditional thinking says the more critical the application, the more tightly its development must be planned, staged and controlled. The truth is, a flexible culture is stronger, safer and more robust. This talk gives practical tips for adopting an agile approach to planning, team interactions and risk management. When the culture shifts, teams achieve goals sooner and safety is greatly enhanced.

In this interview, Jeff Patton discusses the Product Owner role and points out that Agile has never been very focused on the customer. While Agile development excels at “delivery”, it struggles to support “discovery” (i.e. defining what the customer really needs). Also discussed are techniques such as Lean Startup and story maps and the importance of defining business value in an Agile context.
In this interview at Agile 2011, Jez Humble discusses continuous delivery and the deployment pipeline, emphasizing the importance of feedback and automating tests at every level to validate deployments. Gone are the days of massive acceptance test scripts. He also talks about the evils of feature branching, and speaks on the DevOps practices to collaborate all the way through the delivery cycle.

Domain Driven Design is a vision and approach for designing a domain model that reflects a deep understanding of the business domain. This book is a short, quickly-readable summary and introduction to the fundamentals of DDD; it does not introduce any new concepts; it attempts to concisely summarize the essence of what DDD is, drawing mostly Eric Evans' book, as well other sources since published such as Jimmy Nilsson's Applying Domain Driven Design, and various DDD discussion forums.