Our test/development website is being replaced, and we are to specify a new one.
What kinds of collaborative web development and testing environments are thought best practice in (further) education institutes?
We would be looking at these kind of requirements:
1 building up libraries of reusable components (for example XSLT and CSS stylesheets) before live deployment;
2 server technologies (ASP.NET, possibly PHP);
3 alpha (developer) testing, beta (user) testing, white box (see the code), black box (don't see the code), accessibility, usability, performance and other testing and debugging (possibly including user testing of rules with dummy data);
4 persistent URLs (and URL rewriting);
5 demos, proofs of concept, working prototypes (early versions of applications), simulations (for example, URL crafting in web and email), code examples;
6 connections to test and production data sources (or offline caches of these) and external web services/resources;
7 integration with a code repository (we use Microsoft SourceSafe);
8 developing web services;
9 documentation, versioning and branching;
10 per user, per team and cross-institute work areas;
11 possibly a feedback system;
12 (externally-sourced) server and user interface (say, rich text editor) component testing;
13 possibly support for open source licensing and publishing to general public;
14 possibly sample data/content generation;
15 media generation (say, XML to PDF/HTML, images, office documents);
16 technical peer reviews (discuss, share best practice);
and so on.
As I say, we are more interested at the moment in best patterns and practices for small teams of developers rather than a packaged solution.
Tavis Reddick
Web Content and Architecture Developer
ICT Systems Development
ICT Department
Adam Smith College
telephone: +44 (0)1592 223313
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