by Steven
Continued from Websites are houses too - Part 1
Last week, I talked about a classic recurring dilemma among IT, and especially web development - that is a perception that making websites is somehow easier and less critical than, say, building houses. When a house is getting build, tonnes of time is spent planning and organising it - but with websites, time spent doing that is often perceived as a waste, and the “just get it done” mentality prevails.
There is a solution for the dilemma faces in part 1, and that is a little something called the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There are many difference processes available for handling a project, and the best should be chosen based on the team, the size and nature of the project, time constraints and experience. A few of the more popular ones are Waterfall, Agile and Iterative (Spiral). I will go into a little bit more detail about the waterfall model, as it is what we use to manage our clients’ requirements.
The waterfall model splits development up into a handful of phases - It basically boils down to Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, Maintenance. The idea of the model is to specify as much as possible in an early phase, signing it off, before moving down to the next phase. Any irregularities that are found in a lower phase should be passed up to the earlier phase before continuing.
Continue reading “Websites Are Houses Too - Part 2″
Tags: devlopment, model, process, scope creep
by Steven
It’s strange how people take web development a lot less seriously than other kinds of development. When a house is being built, does the builder get told “give me a quote on a house”, and expect an answer in 5 mins? Asking something like that would get the customer laughed at to the point of embarrasment, or a large series of forms and questions relating to it:
- How many rooms?
- How many stories?
- What colour walls?
- How do you want interior decoration?
- High set house?
- …and so on
Yet a large amount of people asking for things in web development ask the simple question - “how much for a store?”, “We just want to capture information to use it in an email campaign”. Let’s focus on some of the nuances of a simple online store, to show there’s just as much thought required into scoping out requirements before being able to accurately quote things:
- Are there different categories of products, or just 1?
- What fields do you want people to be able to search on?
- Tax rates? Multi currency? Shipping?
- Do you want the user to have to sign up to the website
- What about order tracking?
- How do you want payments taken? Paypal? Saucepay? Securepay?
- Are offline payment methods available - COD, pay on pickup, invoice, direct debit?
- What do you want the store to look like? (This is a whole new can of worms - I’ll leave this one open to the designers!)
- Do you want it friendly to disabled users?
- …the list goes on!
Continue reading “Websites are houses too…”
Tags: model, process, programming, requirements, scope creep, specification
