When building small web sales, coding and production details can usually be kept in the head of a single developer. Any development effort larger than a handful of pages, however, will benefit from some basic software engineering techniques.
This section focuses on simple, practical techniques that you can easily apply to web projects. For a more rigorous, comprehensive treatment of software engineering theory and techniques, see one of the standard software engineering texts, such as Pressman’s Software Engineering (1997).
A classic treatment of organizational and practical software development issues can be found in Fred Brooks’s Mythical Man-Month (1975),
Following proper software engineering techniques (or modifying them for web development) can have a substantial impact on overall system usability primarily because it enables developers to achieve higher quality.
This allows developers to systematically meet usability goals on time and within budget. It also allows for better client communications and improves usability for the system’s development team.
Software engineering processes are similar in spirit to the overall web development process, and they follow similar principles of iterative design and pervasive evaluation.
However, software development has its own, unique contributions to usability (see the sidebar “Why Software Engineers Are Critical for Usability”), and they are reflected in the following engineering techniques.
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