Web Development is Software Development

17 September 2004

With a considerable amount of the world’s web development being performed in a context focussed on visual design, it’s easy to see how that work can get pushed to the side a little. That’s not to say that the importance of development work isn’t recognised, but perhaps that the nature of the work isn’t recognised for what it is. Within the context of a web shop or design agency the tendency is to approach development aspects of a project in the same way as the design. However, development is not the same as design, and the processes and management of such work has to reflect this.

When all is said and done, web development is a flavour of software development. Of course this is both a blessing and a curse. Recognising your projects as software development means enacting all sorts of formal processes and procedures, and having to worry about nasty stuff like specification documents, bug tracking and team structure. The upside to this is that the software industry is far more mature than the web development industry, and they have learned the hard way that all these processes and procedures and nasty things like specs, bug tracking and team structure will save your project.

Thankfully, this general trend seems to be shifting with the increased demand for full-blown web applications. With more and more businesses realising that web-based software is not only convenient, flexible and cool, but hey, it’s pretty cost-effective too, the discipline balance within new projects is tipping towards development rather than a design. In short, our work is starting to look more like the software development projects that they are.

The good news is that there’s simply a ton of information, books, articles and such about software development and management out there. As I’ve mentioned before, writing the code is the easy bit, and most of thought and teaching on good software development practises focusses on people, the management of the project and the product itself. These are all valuable lessons that apply equally well to any web development project. Ignoring them is quite simply a terrible waste.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Carl-Johan Kihlbom: I agree, things are starting to shift. As someone who has been developing web applications for almost 5 years now, I’m finally seeing clients who understand the need (and are willing to pay) for formal processes and specifications. About time!
§ mattymcg: I think there is another down side to this trend, no doubt a result of software people deploying to the web without giving much thought to this “new” medium. And that is that a lot of web applications I see being developed (and that I have to use) suffer from:

– ugly interface design
– terrible, frustrating, unbearable response times
– a complete lack of thought as to standards and accessibility

ie. a “Hey we can do this in Java, how cool would that be!” approach for something that could just as easily have been done in HTML/CSS and perhaps a touch of JavaScript. And as a result accessibility goes out the window and all the good work the standards people have done over the years gets undone.
§ Noah Slater: Over the six years I’ve been in the business I have seen some dramatic changes to the standard practices and methodologies in the field.

When I started people used to look at me funny if I mentioned “floating” layers that could move and such, other bells and whistles. Now while I would never use such fancy DHTML techniques on a site anymore, when that new technology was still in it’s infancy I remember being very excited about the possibilities with this new medium.

Unfortunately, no one else was.

I remember multiple, multiple, times I had to spend hours explaining to companies and prospective clients how they could benefit from a website.

The change has been dramatic in the last few years, and it has had ramifications into most areas of web development.

I now work for a well known international e-commerce site and I can tell you that even though I would consider my work to be essentially the same – the ethos of my workplace differers dramatically to that of yester-year.

I now work in a large team, everyone having their own responsibilities. New projects are heavily discussed, functional and technical specifications are produced, development is undertaken and there is source control and bug tracking.

For what it’s worth – it feels like I’m a software engineer. A software engineer who’s deployment platform is the web.
§ Dan Webb: Good post. I agree.
§ vanderwal: I completely agree. I lump it all in information application development and have since about 2001. I realized everything I knew about application development, interaction design, and web design applied to each of the fields. I am still dumbfounded with folks that call themselves application developers and use the web browser for their interface, but don’t know the first thing about the browser and how it works (these folks really have horrible problems when it comes to mobile use).
§ jennifer: I think you’re wrong. The web is about two very different things: information presentation and application development. The former is not a “flavor” of the latter, it is an entirely different thing. Treating the two as synonymous leads to muddled project trajectories on either side of the fence.

Cf. Jesse James Garrett’s “The Elements of User Experience” (http://www.jjg.net)
§ Drew McLellan: Jennifer, information presentation wouldn’t normally come under the banner of development. Certainly in the context of this article we’re not discussing flat web sites, and I’m not sure where you’d get the impression that we were.

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