I’m doing my dissertation in college on Workflow methods for collaborative web development.
Does anybody know any good books or papers that explain modern web development workflow practices? I’ve been searching for a while but I tend to find tutorials on how to set up workflow environments rather than explain the theory behind them.
Boag’s Digital Adaptation might be worth a look. It covers what’s being done wrong and how the process should be done in the new digital environment.
Version Control (git, subversion, perforce, etc) – prevent conflicts and keep code synchronized. Adding to that using the concept of branching and merging instead of working directly on a master branch.
Virtual Environments w/ automated build scripts for getting newcomers up and running quickly with an environment to work that closely mirrors production.
Providing dedicated remote environments for development (testing), staging (stake holder testing), and production. Making sure those environments are kept synchronized while also allowing them to be configured slightly different for things such as automated emails, etc.
Internal documentation for higher and lower level procedures with software, middle-ware, etc being created. Even documentation for vendor specific functionality but relative to direct business goals at hand.
When referring to large community oriented projects events that bring people together like seminars, and code camps. Being able to put faces to names and visually see the community.
having a diverse skill-set across a team with overlap in the right/appropriate places.
At the end of the way the general concept throughout is consistency. The more physical hardware and virtual software that is the same across the team the more concrete and stable the entire ecosystem will be. Speaking in terms of PHP development having someone working on windows w/ xampp and another on mac with everything manually installed is a sure way to have problems down the line. If those machines were the only option it would be better for both to be using a virtualized linux environment perhaps.
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