jim.shamlin.com

Build-Out and Production

After planning and designing, the next step in the process is building out the actual site. Since a plan for development has been developed, what remains now is to execute upon it.

During this phase, actual pages, programs, and graphics are being developed on a development server. Offline, authors may be writing text and producers creating video and multimedia components. EN: The author attempts to describe these processes, for the benefit of project managers without a technical background, but he does a really sloppy job of it.

A critical task for the project manager is keeping the members of his team coordinated, such that each knows what he is supposed to be doing, tasks are being handled in the necessary order, and players aren't stepping on one another's toes.

To keep things sane, it is recommended that the project manager should take the lead in preparing detailed documentation to define the directory structure and file-naming conventions for the site, specific ways for the team to share notes on programming and production, and procedures for accessing the working files to prevent overwriting one another.

The author suggests that usability testing should be done at this point, giving users access to the site after it is built to see if they can perform specific tasks with only general instructions (find two items in inventory, add them to a shopping cart, remove one of them, check out with the other item), but (EN) it seems a little late in the game, as it would require a lot of rework.


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