How to decrease front end development time in a company/team environment?

Question

How to decrease front end development time in a company/team environment? My company is asking to suggest idea to make front end development process faster?

Some points

1. I realized main problem is client never provide right information at first time

2. and many front end developer works on same project on same CSS so everyone makes his own method sometimes. It increase time of process.

3. Graceful degradation and progressive enhancement both takes time to think and development. should we think about it? it increase the project cost.

4. How to judge time estimation by just seeing a PSD for to make PSD in Cross browser Compatible XHTML CSS. Most of the time I always give less time then then takes more time.

Any other suggestions to improve work efficiency in a team (50 people) environment?

Answer 1

Use a framework such as Ruby on Rails?

Answer 2

if the problem is the speed of user interface design, try Balsamiq mockups

Answer 3

Good question!

Maintain and be loyal to a schedule, write and maintain good requirements, and have meaningful code reviews.

• Knowing that requirements change, reduce dependencies between software components through OOP.
• Write good requirements - take a look at Agile.
• Code reviews are more than a means to ensure the code is correct; it can be a vehicle to teach.

Answer 4

The most important thing we've found that helps speed up UI development is having complete mock-ups. Have a designer work out all of the look-and-feel and UI interaction stuff ahead of time and document it and development goes significantly faster.

Answer 5

Complete mock ups, with the latest images hosted somewhere everyone can see [something like Basecamp from 37 signals]

Have the designers come up with the css/html themselves to ensure proper coloring etc... It's happened before that the PSD was passed to the html guy and the colors just didn't match up properly, adding to more ui time.

Don't ask programmers to do CSS/HTML, because we typically suck at it :)

Answer 6

You will spend less time developing if you spend more time designing. Talk to the clients often, show prototypes (I recommend paper prototypes as they will think demos or anything looking polished is close to being finished). Insist on talking to the real end user when getting requirements. The person who will use the interface knows far more than senior management about what is actually needed. Ask about edge cases that have to be handled. If you have a product in place, observe for at least a day how it is being used.

Push back when requirements change. This cut our development time drastically because we now tell them how much more it will cost in time and money every time they expand the requirements. BY charging more and slipping the deadline every time, many unnneded enbellishments are dropped. This gives them an incentive to do a better job of defining the requirements the first time.