How to apply coding methodologies and practices to non-coding work?

Question

I can talk for hours about best-practice, source control, change management, feature tracking, development cycles and the lot, but most of what I've learnt or read seems to apply to nuts-and-bolts programming of compiled applications. You know, ASCII files that gets turned into 1s and 0s.
How does one apply the same discipline and wisdom to working in environments that are point-and-click, config-centric. I'm thinking of CMSs and specifically, my current 9 to 5, SharePoint. Traditional practices of source control, dev-staging-production seem to break down since we're not working with code, and the live environment changes with user input.

So to sum up a rather lengthy question, what works in a no-code environment?

Answer 1

Don't throw away best practices because of the way non-programmers manage application changes. Point-and-click can screw up a SharePoint site just as easy as written code. No reason why you wouldn't have development and test environments for SharePoint. They'll tell you it is not necessary, but they don't know any better. And then there's documentation...

Answer 2

I don't see why those things couldn't be adapted toward a no-code environment. All of these are more specific forms of engineering practices. Generalize them away from the code and then specify them towards your current projects.

Answer 3

There is no such a thing as a "coding methodology". Coding is just part of a much larger process, which we may call "software development". This larger process entails business, organisational, architectural, design, deployment and, of course, coding issues.

Methodologies need to be comprehensive in order to work, and therefore need to cover all these issues coherently. They need to express the process, products and people aspects related to all those aspects I've mentioned above. So a methodology necessarily applies to non-coding work.

Most of us who work in a very specific area of engineering (such as coding) tend to have a narrower view of the whole picture, and sometimes (understandably) forget about the rest. But true methodologies are all-encompassing.