Successful Web Methodologies

Martin Bauer
2005.10.23

Commercial web development has been around for more than 10 years. As an industry, we are still fairly young when you consider others that have been around for centuries. But our relative youth as an industry is no excuse for not doing better. From the number of sites that have been rebuilt for clients, it’s clear that there is still a lot of poor quality work being done and this affects us all. It means clients are more wary and less trustful of web developers. Anything that tarnishes our industry can tarnish all of us individually. This leads to the obvious question – what’s the answer? Having tried, trusted and standard approach would go a long way to helping avoid the mistakes we see over and over again. Ie. a web methodology. However, finding a methodology that works for web development is not easy and making it work is even harder.

Back in the heady dotcom days as the Development Manager for a team of 20, this was exactly the dilemma I faced. This article covers the issues that arose and how we as a team went about trying to resolve them. What came out of this was the successful adaptation of an existing methodology for web development.