Differences in development process - Applications vs. websites

Question

Background: All of my experience in developing software and managing projects has been related to applications (not counting a few trivial hacked-together websites here and there). Process-wise, I typically start off templating Rapid Development and the Software Project Survival Guide and then tweaking the plan to suit the needs, resources, etc. of the project. This has worked well for me.

Soon I'm going to start building a website to supplement an application that I've been working on that will require a lot more planning and foreknowledge than sites I've made previously (think something akin to Newgrounds). There will be 2 other developers on the project, and we're all on separate continents (only reason I mention this is to dissuade answers involving "small team doesn't need any kind of formal process").

My question is, what changes should I anticipate when moving from the planning of an application to the planning of a website (though the site will involve web applications as well. using django.)?

Answer 1

I typically distinguish between web sites and web applications. If the site is mostly content and a UI to find and manipulate the content, then I consider that to be a web site.

If, on the other hand, you actually do things on the site, or affect other parts of the world, then that's an application that happens to be delivered over the web, hence a "web application" to my mind.

I would largely develop a web application the same way as any other: best practices, separation of concerns, automated unit tests if not test-driven development, etc. The only place you should be seeing a difference is in the nature of the UI.

Depending on your platform, you may not have the same tools available for testing the actual Web UI as you'd be used to for testing a desktop UI. To my mind, if you've thoroughly covered all the non-UI code, then this is not such a big deal.

OTOH, if you are testing a UI that is rich in JavaScript, then you may want to look into any testing tools for JavaScript. I believe there are some, but I'm afraid I can't tell you where they are. In the absence of automated tools, I would create test pages that exercise the individual controls or other JavaScript classes individually.