The cloud has rapidly gone from "that thing I should know something about" to the "centerpiece of our corporate IT five-year strategy." However, cloud computing is still in its infancy. Sure, the marketing materials presented by cloud providers tout huge cost savings and service level improvements-but they gloss over the many risks such as data loss, security leaks, gaps in availability, and application migration costs. Ken Johnston and Seth Eliot share new research on the successful migrations of corporate IT and web-based companies to the cloud. Ken and Seth lay out the risks to consider and explore the rewards the cloud has to offer when companies employ sound architecture and design approaches. Discover the foibles of poor architecture and design, and how to mitigate these challenges through a novel Test Oriented Architecture (TOA) approach.

Soon mobile devices will be able to do most everything, right? Although it's fun to talk about how much mobile devices can or will do soon, limitations and constraints remain now and will for a long time. With the lower-tier market offering scaled-down devices, even the latest generation mobile devices have hardware, network, and operating system constraints. These limitations will seriously affect the architecture, design, and testing decisions for your mobile development projects. Jacob Stevens offers a primer on the unique dynamics and constraints of these lucrative platforms. Learn about the implications of mobile platform constraints that impact development and, ultimately, your customers' experience. Discover potential failure points hidden in hardware specifications and explore the trade-offs necessary for mobile success.

Many teams build software that does not behave as their customers and users want-and expect. To build the right software the first time, teams need more than written user stories or even detailed specs. Adding "executable requirements" to your specifications toolbox is a way to ensure that the software does what users expect and need day-one. Until now, writing executable requirements mostly has been considered a dark art. Eric Landes shares methods of building executable requirements-automated acceptance tests-that deliver immediate value for your customers. Eric describes ways to create these “excellent” requirements even in difficult situations-collaborating over different time zones, refining vague needs, and product owners speaking with different voices.

Agile projects commonly capture customer needs via user stories-placeholders for future conversations about those needs. However, when dealing with complex software products-ones with significant existing functionality or when regulations or customers mandate a requirements-driven development process-user stories are not enough. Under such circumstances, traditional requirements engineering practices can be applied at a high level while the team addresses implementation details using a product backlog of user stories. Colin Doyle shows how to ensure success in complex software product development by using high level requirements engineering practices to drive the development and maintenance of the agile product backlog.