Process

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September 27th, 2007

by John Anderson

I hope the main things we took away from the process training is this:

Prototyping is the Anti-Waterfall

Doing development and design iteratively has distinct advantages over the traditional waterfall approach. It creates a high-quality plan while keeping the client heavily involved and able to make needed changes. I hope that this iterative approach can be used more and more as we learn about it.

Progressive Enhancement

If we can get to the point where we’re think about what needs to be there rather than how it should look (or act), I think we’re winning the battle. For HTML-based applications, its content -> structure/markup -> presentation -> behavior. For some of our more interactive Flash applications, we need to think about what functions are needed, then organize them and give them context, then decide how they should look.

For HTMLers, I’d ask they maintain separation between these layers (no inline styles or JS, good semantic markup). Font tags and tables can sometimes be the result of not progressively enhancing something. Any of you Flash guys have some best-practices on how layering can work well in Flash/Flex applications?

The Process is not a One Man Show

This has two main facets: first of all, I don’t want to become the process-police. I want as much feedback as I can on how things should work so we can test things out and continually become better at we do. Please check out the (temporary) Process Wiki and send me a note. Thanks to those who have reviewed things thus far. This has got to be a community effort, or it won’t work.

Secondly, I hope we can start to involve the many roles we have here at mediaRAIN in more parts of the process. If we have a designer, developer, and business manager providing some input (however small) at every stage in the process, none of our applications will ugly, unstable, or unprofitable. The more we can break down any walls between these groups, the better.

That said, here’s the Process wiki page. Those of you who have found my Process easter egg have been rewarded. Best of luck to the rest of you.