The daily life of an IT professional is filled with "Best practices" and "conventions". Most IT organizations, these days, make sure that people follow what has been laid down strictly and have effective mechanisms to penalize bad and unorganized work. It is only when things are standardized that other people working on the project will understand what needs to be done. Some developers believe that "Free thinking" is lost when you follow things that strictly and coding becomes a "best practice" guide. Well, I used to believe that too in the beginning of my programming life, but, as the days went by, I strongly stood for these norms and conventions and even went far enough to lay down a system in my previous workplace.
We have "Best practices" for everything almost – design, development, UI building etc. I believe that "best practice" is a process by itself. It starts from design/layout and moves through development, testing and release. On many occasions, I have seen apps fail due to designs that don't follow these practices. To start with, Photoshop layers are not named or Flash libraries are cluttered with items that haven't been properly named. By the time the application releases, it would have changed from one thing to a totally different thing, far from what was initially visualized. I remember that we once had a hard time trying to change the UI (for adding a feature) of an application just before we hit beta. The structure of the design was such that it took us more time to actually figure out some of the layers and how things actually flowed. It is a simple best practice! But, most people blame "time" for doing a sloppy job, even if the final output is classy!
Here are some best practices that designers must follow:
- Give proper names to Layers. If a layer contains a button, call it "Button" and not "Joe".
- Make sure that the final version (that goes to development) has all unused elements deleted and items optimized.
- Make sure that the design works in specified resolutions. Sometimes designers use a higher screen resolution while designing, whereas, the target screen resolution could be 1024x768. Here, the elements of the UI would look really large!
- Use folders to organize page content or specific related content. This applies to Library/layers etc. For example, all elements used in the Homepage of a site could be in a folder called "Homepage".
- Use Web palette colours where ever possible to make sure that colours are easily coded.
- Name files properly and organize it into folders.
- Use colours to darken/lighten text instead of using Layer alpha property (esp. in Photoshop).
- "Usability" and "flexibility" of the interface need to be kept in mind while designing layouts.
- Use system Fonts for dynamic text fields esp. For HTML pages.
..and the list goes on.
Best practices for developers:
- Every programming language has coding conventions that should be followed.
- Name your variables, functions, classes etc with sense and in context.
- Use functions and make code more reusable.
- Keep code in one place as far as possible.
- Comment code properly with proper descriptions.
- Avoid using "reserved" words.
- Make sure you test the performance of your code and optimize it before you release stages.
- Avoid those last minute "IF" fixes. These are mostly done before beta.
- Create a proper structure – for your code, for the application as a whole.
- Make sure your code can be easily extended, so that, if some additional features are requested, you can add functionality easily.
..this list goes on too!
Best practices for Managers/Leads:
- Make sure your team exactly understands what they have to do. Hold meetings/discussions that would help this purpose.
- Establish a proper workflow to enable not only easy management, but, a smooth functioning as well.
- Make sure the people get enough time for everything. The client says something has to be done in x amount of time, make sure that your team can handle it. If you are able to convince the client for an extension, it is most ideal.
- Establish a proper process to help monitor progress and workflow.
- Layout a proper project plan, which needs to be communicated to the team.
- Make sure all team members follow "best practices" and standards laid out.
- Have a system in place which enables code/design checks to help make sure things are going as per plan.
- Have a Management dashboard to tell you exactly how things are and communicate the good/bad with the team.
- Make sure that team members have a proper work-life balance.
- Showing your stress is a strict NO-NO.
- Never expose you team members to clients or involve them in remarks during discussions with clients. This will be your downfall.
..this list could go on too!
There is not real definitive guide to all these things. Most come by practice and with experience.
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