Aggressive Timelines - The Cohesion of Web Design, Web Development, and Testing

By Darin Humbard | Published November 9, 2015 | Categories: Web Development

Where do you start on the importance of the synergy between design, development, and testing when faced with an aggressive timeline when their importance has been written about for years? A good place to start is to discuss the real life impacts of testing on E-Commerce and site redesign projects. Beacon recently completed an e-commerce upgrade and site redesign for a local client. While
challenging, the project was worthwhile for the client, and a learning experience for those involved as to the benefits of effective design, coding, and testing. Our client had requested a very aggressive timeline to get their new site and upgraded e-commerce engine into production. Beacon accommodated that request and our client was rewarded with a robust design with clean lines, a strong e-commerce engine in AspDotNetStorefront 9.5, and a responsive web presence to allow them to focus on selling their products and using their new web/commerce engine to further that pursuit. Beacon was able to accomplish this goal in a short period by compressing design, development, and testing without losing our focus on quality and the end goal. Being constantly quality focused throughout the software development life cycle pays its own dividends. As the old saying goes, a quality effort produces quality results.

Design

Beacon makes it a point to generate strong designs that fit our clients’ needs and that follow their organizational personalities. Extensive work is put into the designs and includes feedback from Beacon developers and clients throughout the process to produce a synergistic site that is functional, adaptable, and attractive. Beacon designs for style and functionality, but also tries to match the client’s organizational personality. Beacon successfully delivered a project like this very recently. The client was using a design that had been in existence for five+ years without change and sought to upgrade their presence. Beacon was able to create a design that met or exceeded their expectations and that brought them into the era of responsive web presence.

Development
Developers should be highly focused on producing quality code. It should almost be a competition of quality to ensure that a developer’s code was better than the time before, or better than their office neighbor. This shows in the results of code releases. Before our testers are given the opportunity to test applications or site design modifications, our developers have already exhaustively tested their own work. I understand that is supposed to be the norm but many software development organizations do not approach their work in that manner. As a result of that approach, we are able to eliminate a large portion of our bugs before our own internal testers touch the product. The benefit to the client is quicker time to production and reduced downstream error rates.

Software Testing

Following the testing by the developers, the code and site were released to our testers to put the site through its paces. The site was extensively tested for desktop, mobile, and handheld responsive traits. The design itself was robust, and handled the testing very well with very few hiccups. The e-commerce engine, AspDotNetStorefront 9.5, was also very strong, and its new responsive skin features were easy to implement and adapt. As a result, Beacon was able to employ a very aggressive timeline for development, and deliver a quality product to the client.

Successful cohesion of design, development, and testing. The siren song of software development and a goal that is attainable. As an aside, for further more in-depth reading on AspDotNetStoreftont 9.5, I would suggest this article regarding the new release of aspdotnet storefront 9.5.