How to apply coding methodologies and practices to non-coding work?

Posted by Dan on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Dan
Published on 2010-05-11T10:41:42Z Indexed on 2010/05/11 10:44 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 289

Filed under:

best-practices

|

web-development

|

software-engineering

I can talk for hours about best-practice, source control, change management, feature tracking, development cycles and the lot, but most of what I've learnt or read seems to apply to nuts-and-bolts programming of compiled applications. You know, ASCII files that gets turned into 1s and 0s.
How does one apply the same discipline and wisdom to working in environments that are point-and-click, config-centric. I'm thinking of CMSs and specifically, my current 9 to 5, SharePoint. Traditional practices of source control, dev-staging-production seem to break down since we're not working with code, and the live environment changes with user input.

So to sum up a rather lengthy question, what works in a no-code environment?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about best-practices

Batch Best Practices and Technical Best Practices Updated

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
The Batch Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products (Doc Id: 836362.1) and Technical Best Practices for Oracle Utilities Application Framework Based Products (Doc Id: 560367.1) have been updated with updated and new advice for the various versions of the Oracle… >>> More
Partial template specialization of free functions - best practices

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
As most C++ programmers should know, partial template specialization of free functions is disallowed. For example, the following is illegal C++: template <class T, int N> T mul(const T& x) { return x * N; } template <class T> T mul<T, 0>(const T& x) { return T(0); } //… >>> More
Object Oriented PHP Best Practices

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Say I have a class which represents a person, a variable within that class would be $name. Previously, In my scripts I would create an instance of the object then set the name by just using: $object->name = "x"; However, I was told this was not best practice? That I should have a function set_name()… >>> More
Good place to look for example Database Designs - Best practices

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have been given the task to design a database to store a lot of information for our company. Because the task is rather big and contains multiple modules where users should be able to do stuff, I'm worried about designing a good data model for this. I just don't want to end up with a badly designed… >>> More
Notification Email Best Practices--From Server Setup to Programming

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
All, I'm in the process now of building a SaaS tool that allows network admins to generate notification emails to the members of the end-users of our platform (among many many other things). I'm running into a bit of an "out of my expertise" wall, as I know there are a lot of variables involved… >>> More

Related posts about web-development

Web Development - How to Get Started in Web Development

as seen on Ezine Articles - Search for 'Ezine Articles'
11 years ago I purchased a book about basic HTML development. A purchase that would end up defining my entire professional career. I bought it because I wanted to create a web page for a school project. This was in the days of Geo city sites and it looked absolutely horrible. >>> More
PHP Web Development, Web Development Using PHP As an Open Source

as seen on Ezine Articles - Search for 'Ezine Articles'
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP is the most famous language nowadays as it is an open source and web development requires no costs in implementation. >>> More
How to get full query string parameters not UrlDecoded

as seen on Developer IT - Search for 'Developer IT'
Introduction While developing Developer IT’s website, we came across a problem when the user search keywords containing special character like the plus ‘+’ char. We found it while looking for C++ in our search engine. The request parameter output in ASP.NET was “c “.… >>> More
Tracking download of non-html (like pdf) downloads with jQuery and Google Analytics

as seen on Developer IT - Search for 'Developer IT'
Hi folks, it’s been quite calm at Developer IT’s this summer since we were all involved in other projects, but we are slowly comming back. In this post, we will present a simple way of tracking files download with Google Analytics with the help of jQuery. We work for a client that offers… >>> More
What is the best .NET web development framework?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm looking for a framework to simplify the creation of a website with social networking features and plenty of custom functionality. I'm quite keen to use an ORM like nHibernate or similar for data access. Would DotNetNuke be a good choice? Or are there other options which are better. Added: I'm… >>> More