Saturday, November 10, 2007

What changes for developers with Web2.0?

An older article, but a good one, and I tend to agree. You can get a feeling of some of the arguments from the comments, but it's a great read.
Software isn't written for Web 2.0 companies the way it was during the bubble, nor is it written the way traditional, shipped software was. New ideas about Web applications seem to necessitate new ways of making those applications.
Web 2.0 Development

One particularly controversial point is the changes to QA... is the standard way of doing QA no longer relevant? What happens when the community builds the site? How can QA properly test against a snapshot of a point in time, even with source control?

T

2 comments:

Cam said...

I wonder how much of the lack of QA and loose release management is a factor of relatively young companies and products who simply haven't been bitten by a really bad bug, and how much of it is truly new coding.

Even in the old days, young projects and companies skipped QA and had developers do tech support. I wonder if the same pressures that changed those paradigms will eventually do it to "Web 2.0".

Cats and Radishes Art said...

Good point, possibly. There seems to be a real desire in the web development world to pretend that everything is new and original, too often ignoring the advice of everything that came before (see comments by 'Perrin Harkins' in the original article).

The two sticking points for me are that:
- many current "social" web apps are built by the visitors. The web application becomes much less important than the content added. This adds some real QA headaches.
- Version control for backwards compatibility becomes pointless - there is only ever one version of the application in use by all users (see comment by user 'Dean')

The followup article talks about some of this stuff:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/02/three_interesting_web_developm.html

T