Part of being a pro­fes­sional and lik­ing your job is being frus­trated with the way things are going in your respec­tive field. Some time ago I started to cre­ate my own func­tional spec­i­fi­ca­tion frame­work and chris­tened it “Test Dri­ven Require­ments engi­neer­ing” or TDR. With it I com­bined best prac­tices of design­ing with those of require­ments engi­neer­ing and soft­ware test­ing. The prod­uct, a TDR design, should be able to do the following

• Give a client a clear view of the soft­ware he’s about to pay for
• Give a devel­oper a clear view of what he’s sup­posed to develop
• Let them both agree up front, min­i­miz­ing the risk of rela­tion­ships turn­ing sour and soft­ware projects being bogged down

The first arti­cle about this frame­work was pub­lished in App­works in 2010. Since then I refined the model incor­po­rat­ing it in a generic soft­ware project frame­work dubbed the “Mile­stone Frame­work”. One of my goals is to offer all I’ve com­mit­ted to paper in this blog, which is turn­ing out to be a con­sid­er­able task.

Soft­ware typ­i­cally used

I use a num­ber of soft­ware pro­grams to make a soft­ware designs.

Microsoft Visio: A vec­tor based soft­ware pro­gram I use for mak­ing UML designs or mock­ups for legacy software

Adobe Illus­tra­tor CS5: The indus­try stan­dard “big daddy” of vec­tor design. Used when the need for a heav­ily detailed mockup is needed. Also for web­de­sign when I need a slice-able template.

Apple iWork: Apple’s Office Suite used for cre­at­ing design documents.

Recent Projects

All projects here were made as a soft­ware designer of soft­ware devel­oper Dex­els. For more infor­ma­tion about their ser­vices or views con­cern­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment con­tact them at info@dexels.com or visit them at www.dexels.com.

Venue Man­age­ment

A Google Earth appli­ca­tion dis­play­ing var­i­ous sports related infor­ma­tion. A detailed user inter­ac­tion design and func­tional spec­i­fi­ca­tion was nec­es­sary because of the rad­i­cal nature of this project.

Bro­ker Deprecation

A tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tion visu­al­iz­ing web ser­vices and related data streams using UML state tran­si­tion dia­grams.

iPhone Match Form

For the Dutch Pro­fes­sional Soc­cer League I designed a dig­i­tal match form for the iPhone plat­form.