Web Development Methodology: Understanding Yhe Skeleton Of Web Development

Web development methodology is all about the planning and creation of a website from the web design stage through to a fully developed website

. This involves the choice of technologies, web design tools, web applications, platforms, graphics, and content. The basics of web development methodology are the most important of the various steps in web development methodology, which are crucial for successful web development.

This article covers the issues that commercial web developers face and how they were resolved. The successful adaptation of an existing methodology for web development (India) was the result of this.

Symptoms

The factors that forced to make a change in web development are that the projects were constantly going over time due to one or other reasons. The main reasons were:

1. Client changing their minds.

2. Interpreting the requirements differently to what the client expected.

3. Underestimation of the work required.

All these factors put forward the need of an alternate methodology.

Adopt, Adapt or Build Own

The three ways of finding a better alternative are:

4. adopt an existing methodology

5. adapt from an existing methodology

6. build our own

Evaluation Criteria

In India, web development offers various criteria for evaluating the methodologies are:

Size- smaller size is found to be more effective.

Cost-cheaper ones are better.

Risk- couldnt afford to get it wrong.

Pragmatic- Simple it had to actually work, not be based on theory. There had to be real world examples of where it had been applied successfully.

Methodologies Evaluated

Rational Unified Process

The scope of RUP is extremely broad covering pretty much everything. This is both its strength and weakness. The main problem is that people tried using the whole of RUP. It is large and sophisticated, the key is to use only the aspects of the process that you need for your project. This makes a lot of sense given that projects often vary and the same approach doesnt always work. Some of the issues of RUP are:

7. It is large, complex and sophisticated. A lot of training is required for this.

8. Even though RUP is comprehensive, it is to be reviewed in depth.

9. Cost associated with the tools that were required to use RUP was high.

Overall, to implement RUP, or a scaled down version of RUP would have been a complex, difficult, time consuming and expensive process that had a high risk of failure.

Process Mentor

The presentation obtained from a Process Mentor representative, was more compact than RUP and therefore easier to get ones head around. It had a series of steps, forms and templates used to run a project. Process Mentor was more comfortable than RUP because is less overwhelming but it still wasnt quite right.

In House Methodologies

A number of experienced developers worked with home grown processes from previous jobs. Each developer shared their ideas. There were a number of techniques that sounded useful but the overall feeling was we werent going to be able to borrow one of these in house methodologies.

Why traditional methodologies failed?

In traditional methodology, the ways to work in web development in India were not considered. The software development time frames are often shorter compared to traditional. In traditional, the experience levels of employees vary and clients often have a poor understanding of whats possible.

Moreover the technology changes rapidly and its all via a single user interface (the browser). All these features are more developed in India web development. Also the soft aspects of software development were also not considered.

Thus instead of adopting or adapting a traditional approach, a new one had to be created.

Agile Methodology

Agile has a Feature Driven Development (FDD) methodology. Some of the other popular agile methodologies are XP, Scrum, Crystal and DSDM. FDD was far better suited to web development.

Overview of FDD

It involves five processes:

1. Develop an overall model

2. Build a features list

3. Planning

4. Design by feature

5. Build by feature

Even though, FDD covered development well but gathering requirements, interface design or testing were not included. The things that concerned while applying FDD were as follows:

Relied on Tech Leads.

Doesnt deal with User Interface design & build.

Not as powerful on smaller projects.

Doesnt cover testing and deployment.

Managing the Transition

In order to check the working of FDD, firstly few key aspects of FDD were introduced into new projects and then an internal test was conducted.

FDD for Small teams

The two aspects of FDD that are of most value in small projects are:

Defining the project in features.

Tracking the project by features.

FDD for Web Development

FDD works effectively on dozens of web projects. It uses the core of FDD and introduces new elements to manage some of the areas that FDD doesnt cover. Below is a high level overview of how FDD can be successfully applied to web development.

Conclusion

FDD deals with many of the issues that arise in web development but it is not the complete answer. Areas such as requirements gathering, visual design, testing and deployment arent covered here. But due to lack of web methodologies, having something effective, albeit incomplete, is a big step forward.

by: Holly Maxted

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