ET's Info-Stew

My most recent foray into website development (ITC) has been wrought with problems because I did not have a solidly defined development process that I followed. But I learn from my mistakes, and so here is what I have:

Website Development Checklist

1. Scoping
2. Model-Controller modifications
3. View modifications
4. QA Review
5. Release

Scoping
Of all of the stages, scoping is the most important. Getting things right at this stage significantly reduces headaches down the line

1. General understanding of the current site MVC
2. Understand exactly what the customer wants
3. Deep understanding of all of the MVC components related to the customer needs
4. Anticipate MVC needs that the customer didn’t specify
   1. Functionality
   2. Interface consistency
5. Plan work – If I can’t answer one or more of these questions, I should try things out on a sandbox environment first.
   1. Any new contributed modules?
   2. Any new custom module code?
   3. What will be the custom configurations?
   4. Any custom configuration code (e.g. custom block visibility, etc.)?
   5. Any custom content code?
   6. Any new theme template files or functions?

QA Review
It is very important to do a solid QA review before releasing to the customer, otherwise it reflects poorly on my work, and it means more work for me.

1. Review all access controls and roles and ensure they are correct
2. Go through the entire site as the anonymous user, looking for
   1. Bad or missing links
   2. Functioning capabilities
   3. Consistent and good-looking interface
   4. Browser compatibility
3. For the next most privileged role, do step 2 looking at the new operations of which the role is capable. Repeat through administrator user.
4. Did I miss anything that was specified in the requirements documents?
5. Did I miss any anticipated needs?
6. What could I suggest for a next phase to make the site better?