Smashing eBook Series: #1 Professional Web Design _____________________________________________________________
working together but rather throwing work over a wall and probably causing existing code to be changed or even totally re-architected. To save time, enhance progressively and measure twice, cut once. The product cycle should begin with a definition of basic functionality; once this is agreed on, all groups can work in parallel and reconvene at later stages in an iterative fashion and make the product a bit better every time. This also means that if there is an emergency and funding gets canned, you can at least deliver a working product. Agile, isn’t it?
Best Practices Come From Application And Iterative Improvement To improve our entire market, we have to stop advertising everything we do as a “best practice.” Best practices should come from real products built by real teams for real clients, with all of the annoyances and problems they bring. Test cases that cover all “current” browsers are nice, but many more things can throw a spanner in the works when we build real products. So, if you work at a company and managed to implement some cool new technology in an existing product or have stories to tell about how shifting to a CSS layout saved your client thousands of dollars, please write about those. We need tangible stories to tell clients, not tales of a bright future.
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