New from SitePoint today is this article - "Succcessful Web Development Methodoligies". It's perfect for anyone out there looking to take a fresh look at their development process (or even those looking into it with fresh eyes).

Consider the number of sites that are rebuilt for clients every day, and you'll likely agree that there's still much poor quality work being done, which affects us all: it means that clients are more wary and less trustful of Web developers. Anything that tarnishes our industry can tarnish all of us individually.

As the Development Manager for a team of 20, in the heady dotcom days, this was exactly the dilemma I faced. This article explores the issues that arose from our lack of a decent methodology, and how we as a team tried to resolve them. The result was the successful adaptation of an existing methodology for Web development.

He talks about some of the symptoms (like projects going overtime), making the decision to adopt or create your own methodoligy, how they evaluated some of the methods (complexity, size, cost, risk, pragmatic), and some examples. They take a look at the Rational Unified Process and the Process Mentor methods, as well as getting into an in-house technique that they adopted - Feature Driven Development. They get into an overview of FDD as well as a step by step on how they went through conforming their development to the process.

I think that a lot of developers (as mentioned in the article), seem to just strike out, not really worrying about how their development will effect the rest of the team - if there is one. It's too easy to get used to developing in a "bubble", working on your own code, in your own sandbox, and not looking to the overall spec to really guide them. Plus, with PHP being such a low-level entry language, there are more and more of those "rouge developers" out there that are creating poor code...a movement really needs to be made to somehow qualify code to a standard, presenting it to the world as a "good, well-developed product" for use. But who sets the standards, and who governs the packages? It's not an easy subject to breach, but I'd like to hear your opinions on it...